THE 
 
 CHOWKHAMBA SANSKRIT STUDIES 
 
 Vol. XVI 
 
 THE SIX SYSTEMS 
 
 OF 
 
 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY 
 
 PROF. MAX MULLER 
 
LIBRARY I 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF I 
 
 C . 
 
THE 
 
 iCHOWKHAMBA SANSKRIT STUDIES 
 
 L 
 
 Vol. XVI 
 
 THE SIX SYSTEMS 
 
 OF 
 
 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY 
 
 BY THE 
 
 RIGHT HON. PROFESSOR MAX MULLER, K. M. 
 
 THE 
 CHOWKHAMBA SANSKRIT SERIES OFFICE 
 
 Post Box 8, Rs. 15-00 Varanasi-1 ( India ) 
 
PRINTED BY 
 
 THE VIDYA VILAS PRESS 
 
 VARANASI-l ( India ) 
 
PUBLISHER'S NOTE ? t 
 
 During the last one year we have reprinted several 
 important out-of-print works, all of which have been greatly 
 welcomed by scholars and students of Indian thought. Thus 
 encouraged we are now bringing out the present work 
 which has been written by the most illustrious of the 
 Orientalists from the West, Prof. Max Muller. 
 
 The work deals with the Six Systems of Indian Philo- 
 sophy, about the greatness of which Prof. Max Muller him- 
 self observes : "It was only in a country like India, with 
 all its physical advantages and dis-advantages, that such a 
 rich development of philosophical thought as we can watch 
 in the six systems of philosophy, could have taken place. 
 
 With this high degree of admiration Prof. Max Muller 
 has tried in the present work to publish the results of his own 
 studies in Indian Philosophy, not so much lo restate the 
 mere tenets of each systems, so deliberately and so clearly 
 put forward by the reputed authors of the principal philo- 
 sophies of India, as to give a more comprehensive account 
 of the philosophical activity of our country from the earliest 
 times, and to show how intimately not only our religion, 
 but our philosophy also was connected with our National 
 character. 
 
 We hope that our present effort would also be welcomed 
 by the Scholars and students alike. 
 
THE SIX SYSTEMS 
 
 OF 
 
 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY 
 
 BY THE 
 
 RIGHT HON. PROFESSOR MAX MULLER, K.M, 
 
 LATE FOREIGN MEMBER OF THE FRENCH INSTITUTE 
 
 NEW IMPRESSION 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. 
 
 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON 
 
 FOURTH AVENUE & 30TH STREET, NEW YORK 
 
 BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS 
 
 1919 
 
PREFACE 
 
 It is not without serious misgivings that I venture at 
 this late hour of life to place before my fellow-workers 
 and all who are interested in the growth of philosophical 
 thought throughout the world some of the notes on the 
 Six Systems of Indian Philosophy which have accumulated 
 in my note-books for many years. It was as early as 
 1852 that I published my first contributions to the study 
 of Indian philosophy in the Zeitschrift der Deutschen Mor- 
 genlandischen Gesellschaft. My other occupations, however, 
 and, more particularly, my preparations for a complete 
 edition of the Rig-Veda, and its voluminous commentary, 
 did not allow me at that time to continue these contri- 
 butions, though my interest in Indian philosophy, as a 
 most important part of the literature of India and of 
 Universal Philosophy, has always remained the same. This 
 interest was kindled afresh when I had to finish for the 
 Sacred Books of the East (vols, I and XV) my translation 
 of the Upanishads, the remote sources of Indian philosophy, 
 and especially of the Vedanta-philosophy, a system in 
 which human speculation seems to me to have reached its 
 very acme. Some of the other systems of Indian philosophy 
 also have from time to time roused the curiosity of scholars 
 and philosophers in Europe and America, and in India 
 itself a revival of philosophic and theosophic studies, though 
 not always well directed, has taken place, which, if it leads 
 to a more active co-operation between European and Indian 
 thinkers, may be productive in the future of most im- 
 portant results. Under these circumstances a general 
 desire has arisen, and has repeatedly been expressed, for 
 
vi PREFACE 
 
 the publication of a more general and comprehensive 
 account of the six systems in which the philosophical 
 thought of india has found its full realisation. 
 
 More recently the excellent publications of Professors 
 Deussen and Garbe in Germany, and of Dr. G, Thibaut in 
 India, have given a new impulse to these important studies, 
 important not only in the eyes of Sanskrit scholars by pro- 
 fession, but of all who wish to become acquainted with 
 all the solutions which the most highly gifted races of 
 mankind have proposed for the eternal riddles of the 
 world. These studies, to quote the words of a high 
 authority, have indeed ceased to be the hobby of a few 
 individuals, and have become a subject of interest to the 
 whole nation. 1 Professor Deussen's work on the Vedanta- 
 philosophy (1883) and his translation of the Vedanta-Sutras 
 (1 887), JProfessor Garbe's translation of the Sawkhya-Sutras 
 (1889) followed by his work on the Samkhya-philosophy 
 (1894), and, last not least, Dr. G. Thibaut's careful and 
 most useful translation of the Vedanta - Sutras in vols. 
 XXXIV and XXXVIII of the Sacred Books of the East 
 (1890 and 1896), mark a new era in the study of the two 
 most important philosophical systems of ancient India, and 
 have deservedly placed the names of their authors in the 
 front rank of Sanskrit scholars in Europe. 
 
 My object in publishing the results of my own studies 
 in Indian philosophy was not so much to restate the mere 
 tenets of each system, so deliberately and so clearly put 
 forward by the reputed authors of the principal philosophies 
 of India, as to give a more comprehensive account of the 
 philosophical activity of the Indian nation from the earliest 
 
 1 Words of the Viceroy of India, see Times, Nov. 8, 1898. 
 
PREFACE vii 
 
 times, and to show how intimately not only their religion, 
 but their philosophy also, was connected with the national 
 character of the inhabitants of India, a point of view which 
 has of late been so ably maintained by Professor Knight 
 of St. Andrews University, 1 
 
 It was only in a country like India, with all its physical 
 advantages and disadvantages, that such a rich develop- 
 ment of philosophical thought as we can watch in the six 
 systems of philosophy, could have taken place. In ancient 
 India there could hardly have been a very severe struggle 
 for life. The necessaries of life were abundantly provided 
 by nature, and people with few tastes could live there like 
 the birds in a forest, and soar like birds towards the fresh 
 air of heaven and the 'eternal sources of light and truth. 
 What was there to do for those who, in order to escape 
 from the heat of the tropical sun, had taken their abode 
 in the shade of groves or in the caves of mountainous 
 valleys, except to meditate on the world in which they 
 found themselves placed, they did not know how or why ? 
 There was hardly any political life in ancient India, such 
 as we know it from the Vedas, and in consequence neither 
 political strife nor municipal ambition. Neither art nor 
 science existed as yet, to call forth the energies of this 
 highly gifted race. While we, overwhelmed with news- 
 papers, with parliamentary reports, -with daily discoveries 
 and discussions, with new novels and time-killing social 
 functions, have hardly any leisure left to dwell on meta- 
 physical and religious problems, these problems formed 
 almost the only subject on which the old inhabitants of 
 India could spend their intellectual energies. Life in a 
 
 1 See 'Mind/ vol. v. no. 17. 
 
viii PREFACE 
 
 forest was no impossibility in the warm climate of India, 
 and in the absence of the most ordinary means of com- 
 munication, what was there to do for the members of the 
 small settlements dotted over the country, but to give 
 expression to that wonder at the world which is the 
 beginning of all philosophy ? Literary ambition could 
 hardly exist during a period when even the art of writing 
 was not yet known, and when there was no literature 
 except what could be spread and handed down by memory, 
 developed to an extraordinary and almost incredible extent 
 under a carefully elaborated discipline. But at a time when 
 people could not yet think of public applause or private 
 gain, they thought all the more of truth ; and hence the 
 perfectly independent and honest character of most of their 
 philosophy. 
 
 It has long been my wish to bring the results of this 
 national Indian philosophy nearer to us, and, if possible, 
 to rouse our sympathies for their honest efforts to throw 
 some rays of light on the dark problems of existence, 
 whether of the objective world at large, or of the subjective 
 spirits, whose knowledge of the world constitutes, after all, 
 the only proof of the existence of an objective world. The 
 mere tenets of each of the six systems of Indian philosophy 
 are by this time well known, or easily accessible, more 
 accessible, I should say, than even those of the leading 
 philosophers of Greece or of modern Europe. Everyone 
 of the opinions at which the originators of the six principal 
 schools of Indian philosophy arrived, has been handed down 
 to us in the form of short aphorisms or Sutras, so as to 
 leave but little room for uncertainty as to the exact position 
 which each of these philosophers occupied on the great 
 
PREFACE ix 
 
 battlefield of thought. We know what an enormous amount 
 of labour had to be spent and is still being spent in order 
 to ascertain the exact views of Plato and Aristotle, nay, 
 even of Kant and Hegel, on some of the most important 
 questions of their systems of philosophy. There are even 
 living philosophers whose words often leave us in doubt 
 as to what they mean, whether they are materialists or 
 idealists, monists or dualists, theists or atheists. Hindu 
 philosophers seldom leave us in doubt on such important 
 points, and they certainly never shrink from the conse- 
 quences of their theories. They never equivocate or try 
 to hide their opinions where they are likely to be unpopular. 
 Kapila, for instance, the author or hero eponymus of the 
 Sawkhya-philosophy, confesses openly that his system is 
 atheistic, an-isvara, without an active Lord or God, but in 
 spite of that, his system was treated as legitimate by his 
 contemporaries, because it was reasoned out consistently, 
 and admitted, nay, required some transcendent and invisible 
 power, the so-called Purushas. Without them there would 
 be no evolution of Praknti, original matter, no objective 
 world, nor any reality in the lookers-on themselves, the 
 Purushas or spirits. Mere names have acquired with us 
 such a power that the authors of systems in which there 
 is clearly no room for an active God, nevertheless shrink 
 from calling themselves atheists, nay, try even by any 
 means to foist an active God into their philosophies, in 
 order to escape the damaging charge of atheism. This 
 leads to philosophical ambiguity, if not dishonesty, and 
 has often delayed the recognition of a Godhead, free from 
 at the trammels of human activity and personality, but 
 yet endowed with wisdom, power, and will. From a philo- 
 
x PREFACE 
 
 sophical point of view, no theory of evolution, whether 
 ancient or modern (in Sanskrit Pariwama), can provide any 
 room for a creator or governor of the world, and hence the 
 Sawkhya-philosophy declares itself fearlessly as an-i5vara, 
 Lord-less, leaving it to another philosophy, the Yoga, to 
 find in the old Samkhya system some place for an isvara 
 or a personal God. What is most curious is that a philo- 
 sopher, such as Sawkara, the most decided monist, and 
 the upholder of Brahman, as a neuter, as the cause of all 
 things, is reported to have been a worshipper of idols and 
 to have seen in them, despite of all their hideousness, 
 symbols of the Deity, useful, as he thought, for the ignorant, 
 even though they have no eyes as yet to see what is hidden 
 behind the idols, and what was the true meaning of them. 
 
 What I admire in Indian philosophers is that they never 
 try to deceive us as to their principles and the consequences 
 of their theories. If they are idealists, even to the verge 
 of nihilism, they say so, and if they hold that the objective 
 world requires a real, though not necessarily a visible or 
 tangible substratum, they are never afraid to speak out. 
 They are bona fide idealists or materialists, monists or 
 dualists, theists or atheists, because their reverence for 
 truth is stronger than their reverence for anything else. 
 The Vedantist, for instance, is a fearless idealist, and, as 
 a monist, denies the reality of anything but the One Brah- 
 man, the Universal Spirit, which is to account for the 
 whole of the phenomenal world. The followers of the 
 Sawkhya, on the contrary, though likewise idealists and 
 believers in an unseen Purusha (subject), and an unseen 
 Prakr/ti (objective substance), leave us in no doubt that 
 they are and mean to be atheists, so far as the existence 
 
PREFACE xi 
 
 of an active God, a maker and ruler of the world, is con- 
 cerned. They do not allow themselves to be driven one 
 inch beyond their self-chosen position. They first examine 
 the instruments of knowledge which man possesses. These 
 are sensuous perception, inference, and verbal authority, 
 and as none of these can supply us with the knowledge of 
 a Supreme Being, as a personal creator and ruler of the 
 world, Kapila never refers to Him in his Sutras. As a 
 careful reasoner, however, he does not go so far as to say 
 that he can prove the non-existence of such a Being, but 
 he is satisfied with stating, like Kant, that he cannot 
 establish His existence by the ordinary channels of evidential 
 knowledge. In neither of these statements can I discover, 
 as others have done, any trace of intellectual cowardice, 
 but simply a desire to abide within the strict limits of 
 knowledge, such as is granted to human beings. He does 
 not argue against the possibility even of the gods of the 
 vulgar, such as Siva, Vishnu, and all the rest, he simply 
 treats them as Ganyesvaras or Karyesvaras, produced and 
 temporal gods ( Sutras III, 57, comm. ), and he does not 
 allow, even to the Supreme Isvar, the Lord, the creator 
 and ruler of the world, as postulated by other systems 
 of philosophy or religion, more then a phenomenal existence, 
 though we should always remember that with him there 
 is nothing phenomenal, nothing confined in space and 
 time, that does not in the end rest on something real and 
 eternal. 
 
 We must distinguish however. Kapila, though he boldly 
 confessed himself an atheist, was by no means a nihilist 
 or Nastika. He recognised in every man a soul which he 
 called Purusha, literally man, or spirit, or subject, because 
 
xii PREFACE 
 
 without such a power, without such endless Purushas, he 
 held that Prakn'ti, or primordial matter with its infinite 
 potentialities, would for ever have remained dead, motion- 
 less, and thoughtless. Only through the presence of this 
 Purusha and through his temporary interest in Praknti 
 could her movements, her evolution, her changes and 
 variety be accounted for, just as the movements of iron 
 have to be accounted for by the presence of a magnet. All 
 this movement, however, is temporary only, and the highest 
 object of Kapila's philosophy is to make Purusha turn his 
 eyes away from Prakrfti, so as to stop her acting and to 
 regain for himself his oneness, his aloneness, his indepen- 
 dence, and his perfect bliss. 
 
 Whatever we may think of such views of the world as 
 are put forward by the Samkhya, the Vedanta, and other 
 systems of Indian philosophy, there is one thing which we 
 cannot help admiring, and that is the straightforwardness 
 and perfect freedom with which they are elaborated. How- 
 ever imperfect the style in which their theories have been 
 clothed may appear from a literary point of view, it seems 
 to me the very perfection for the treatment of philosophy. 
 It never leaves us in any doubt as to the exact opinions 
 held by each philosopher. We may miss the development 
 and the dialectic eloquence with which Plato and Hegel 
 propound their thoughts, but we can always appreciate the 
 perfect freedom, freshness, and downrightness with which 
 each searcher after truth follows his track without ever 
 looking right or left. 
 
 It is in the nature of philosophy that every philosopher 
 must be a heretic, in the etymological sense of the word, 
 
PREFACE xiii 
 
 that is, a free chooser, even if, like the Vadantists, he, for 
 some reason or other, bows before his self-chosen Veda as 
 the seat of a revealed authority. 
 
 It has sometimes been said that Hindu philosophy asserts 
 but does not prove, that it is positive throughout, but not 
 argumentative. This may be true to a certain extent and 
 particularly with regard to the Vedanta-philosophy, but we 
 must remember that almost the first question which every 
 one of the Hindu systems of philosophy tries to settle is, 
 How do we know ? In thus giving the Noetics the first 
 place, the thinkers of the East seem to me again superior to 
 most of the philosophers of the West. Generally speaking, 
 they admitted three legitimate channels by which know- 
 ledge can reach us, perception, inference, and authority, 
 but authority freely chosen or freely rejected. In some 
 systems that authority is revelation, Sruti, Sabda, or the 
 Veda, in others it is the word of any recognised authority 
 Apta-vafcana. Thus it happens that the Samkhya philoso- 
 phers, who profess themselves entirely dependent on reason- 
 ing (Manana), may nevertheless accept some of the utterances 
 of the Veda as they would accept the opinions of eminent 
 men or Sishfas, though always with the proviso that even 
 the Veda could never make a false opinion true. The same 
 relative authority is granted to Smnti or tradition, but 
 there with the proviso that it must not be in contradiction 
 with Sruti or revelation. 
 
 Such an examination of the authorities of human know- 
 ledge (Pramanas) ought, of course, to form the introduction 
 to every , system of philosophy, and to have clearly seen 
 this is, as it seems to me, a very high distinction of Indian 
 philosophy. How much useless controversy would have 
 
xiv PREFACE 
 
 been avoided, particularly among Jewish, Mohammedan, 
 and Christian philosophers, if a proper place had been 
 assigned in limine to the question of what constitutes our 
 legitimate or our only possible channels of knowledge, 
 whether perception, inference, revelation, or anything else / 
 
 Supported by these inquiries into the evidences of truth, 
 Hindu philosophers have built up their various systems of 
 philosophy, or their various conceptions of the world, 
 telling us clearly what they take for granted, and then 
 advancing step by step from the foundations to the highest 
 pinnacles of their systems. The Vadantist, after giving us 
 his reasons why revelation or the Veda stands higher with 
 him than sensuous perception and inference, at least for the 
 discovery of the highest truth (Paramartha). actually puts 
 Sruti in the place of sensuous perception, and allows to 
 perception and inference no more than an authority restricted 
 to the phenomenal (Vyavaharika) world. The conception 
 of the world as deduced from the Veda, and chiefly from 
 the Upanishads, is indeed astounding. It could hardly 
 have been arrived at by a sudden intuition or inspiration, 
 but presupposes a long preparation of metaphysical thought, 
 undisturbed by any foreign influences.' All that exists 
 is taken as One, because if the existence of anything besides 
 the absolute One or the Supreme Being were admitted, 
 whatever the Second by the side of the One might be, it 
 would constitute a limit to what was postulated as limitless, 
 and would have made the concept of the One self-contra- 
 dictory. But then came the question for Indian phiosophers 
 to solve, how it was possible, if there was but the One, that 
 there should be multiplicity in the world, and that there 
 should be constant change in our experience. They knew 
 that the one absolute and undetermined essence, what they 
 
PREFACE xv 
 
 called Brahman, could have received no impulse to change, 
 either from itself, for it was perfect, nor from others, for it 
 was Second-less. 
 
 Then what is the philospher to say to this manifold and 
 ever-changing world ? There is one thing only that he can 
 say, namely, that it is not and cannot be real, but must be 
 accepted as the result of nescience or Avidya, not only of 
 individual ignorance, but of ignorance as inseparable from 
 human nature. That ignorance, though unreal in the 
 highest sense, exists, but it can be destroyed by Vidya, 
 knowledge, i. e. the knowledge conveyed by the Vedanta, 
 and as nothing that can at any time be annihilated has 
 a right to be considered as real, it follows that this cosmic 
 ignorance also must be looked upon as not real, but tem- 
 porary only. It cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said 
 not to exist, just, as our own ordinary ignorance, though we 
 suffer from it for a time, can never claim absolute reality 
 and perpetuity. It is impossible to define Avidya, as little 
 as it is possible to define Brahman, with this difference, 
 however, that the former can be annihilated, the latter 
 never. The phenomenal world which, according to the 
 Vadanta, is called forth, like the mirage in a desert, has its 
 reality in Brahman alone. Only it must be remembered 
 that what we perceive can never be the absolute Brahman, 
 but a perverted picture only, just as the moon which we 
 see manifold and tremulous in its ever changing reflections 
 on the waving surface of the ocean, is not the real moon, 
 though deriving its phenomenal character from the real 
 moon which remains unaffected in its unapproachable re- 
 moteness. Whatever we may think of such a view of the 
 cosmos, a cosmos which, it should be remembered, includes 
 ourselves quite as much as what we call the objective 
 
xvi PREFACE 
 
 world, it is clear that our name of nihilism would be by no 
 means applicable to it. 
 
 The One Real Being is there, the Brahman, only it is not 
 visible, nor perceptible in its true character by any of the 
 senses ; but without it, nothing that exists in our knowledge 
 could exist, neither our Self nor what in our knowledge is 
 not our Self. 
 
 This is one view of the world, the Vedanta view; another 
 is that of the Sawkhya, which looks upon our perceptions 
 as perceptions of a substantial something, of Praknti, the 
 potentiality of all things, and treats the individual per- 
 ceiver as eternally individual, admitting nothing besides 
 these two powers, which by their union or identification 
 cause what we call, the world, and by their discrimination 
 or separation produce final bliss or absoluteness. 
 
 These two, with some other less important views of the 
 world, as put forward by the other systems of Indian 
 philosophy, constitute the real object of what was originally 
 meant by philosophy, that is an explanation of the world. 
 This determining idea has secured even to the guesses of 
 Thales and Heraclitus their permanent place among the 
 historical representatives of the development of philosophical 
 thought by the side of Plato and Aristotle, of Des Cartes 
 and Spinoza. It is in that Walhalla of real philosophers 
 that I claim a place of honour for the representatives of 
 the Vedanta and Samkhya. Of course, it is possible so to 
 define the meaning of philosophy as to exclude men such 
 as even Plato and Spinoza altogether, and to include on the 
 contrary every botanist, entomologist, or bacteriologist. 
 The name itself is of no consequence, but its definition is. 
 And if hitherto no one would have called himself a philoso- 
 
PREFACE xvii 
 
 pher who had not read and studied the works of Plato and 
 Aristotle, of Des Cartes and Spinoza, of Locke, Hume, and 
 Kant in the original. I hope that the time will come when 
 no one will claim that name who is not acquainted at least 
 with the two prominent systems of ancient Indian philo- 
 sophy, the Vedanta and the Samkhya. A President, how- 
 ever powerful, does not call himself His Majesty, why 
 should an observer, a collector and analyser, however full 
 of information, claim the name of philosopher ? 
 
 As a rule, I believe that no one knows so well the defects 
 of his book as the author himself, and I can truly say in 
 my own case that few people can be so conscious of the 
 defects of this History of Indian Philosophy as I myself. 
 It cannot be called a history, because the chronological 
 framework is, as yet, almost entirely -absent. It professes 
 to be no more than a description of some of the salient 
 points of each of the six recognised systems of Indian 
 philosophy. It does not claim to be complete ; on the 
 contrary, if I can claim any thanks, it is for having en- 
 deavoured to omit whatever seemed to me less important 
 and not calculated to appeal to European sympathies. If 
 we want our friends to love our friends, we do not give 
 a full account of every one of their good qualities, but we 
 dwell on one or two of the strong points of their character. 
 This is what I have tried to do for my old friends, Badara- 
 yana, -Kapila, and all the rest. Even thus it could not 
 well be avoided that in giving an account of each of the 
 six systems, there should be much repetition, for they all 
 share so much in common, with but slight modifications, 
 and the longer I have studied the various systems, the more 
 have I become impressed with the truth of the view taken 
 
 2S. 
 
xviii PR-EFACiE 
 
 by Vign&na-Bhikshu and others that there is behind the 
 variety of the six systems a common fund of what may be 
 called national or popular philosophy, a large Manasa lake 
 of philosophical thought and language, far away in the 
 distant North, and in the distant Past, from which each 
 thinker was allowed to draw for his own purposes. Thus, 
 while I should not be surprised, if Sanskrit scholars were 
 to blame me for having left out too much, students of 
 philosophy may think that there is really too much of the 
 same subject, discussed again and again in the six different 
 schools. I have done my best, little as it may be, and my 
 best reward will be if a new interest shall spring up for 
 a long neglected mine of philosophical thought, and if my 
 own book were soon to be superseded by a more complete 
 and more comprehensive examination of Indian philosophy. 
 
 A friend of mine, a native of India, whom 1 consulted 
 about the various degrees of popularity enjoyed at the 
 present day by different systems of philosophy in his. own 
 country, informs me that the only system that can now be 
 said to be living in India is the Vadanta with its branches, 
 the Advaitis, the Madhvas, the Ramanugas, and the Valla- 
 bhas. The Vedanta, being mixed with religion, he writes, 
 has become a living faith, and numerous Pandits can be 
 found to-day in all these sects who have learnt at least the 
 principal works by heart and can expound them, such as 
 the Upanishads, the Brahma-Sutras, the -great Commen- 
 taries of the Akaryas and the Bhagavad-gita. , Some of the 
 less important treatises also are studied, such as the Pawka- 
 dasi and Yoga-Vasishf/za. The Purva-Mimawsa is still 
 studied in Southern India, but not much in other parts, 
 although expensive sacrifices are occasionally performed. 
 The Agnishfoma was performed last year at Benares. 
 
PREFACE xix 
 
 Of the other systems, the Nyaya only finds devotees, 
 especially in Bengal, but the works studied are generally 
 the later controversial treatises, not the earlier ones. 
 
 The Vaiseshika is neglected and so is the Yoga, except 
 in its purely practical and most degenerate form. 
 
 It is feared, however, that even this small remnant of 
 philosophical learning will vanish in one or two generations, 
 as the youths of the present day, even if belonging to 
 orthodox Brahmanic families, do not take to these studies, 
 as there is no encouragement. 
 
 But though we may regret that the ancient method of 
 philosophical study is dying out in India, we should welcome 
 all the more a new class of native students who, after 
 studying the history of European philosophy, have devoted 
 themselves to the honorable task of making their own 
 national philosophy better known to the world at large. 
 I hope that my book may prove useful to them by showing 
 them in what direction they may best assist us in our 
 attempts to secure a place to thinkers such as Kapila and 
 Badarayana by the side of the leading philosophers of 
 Greece, Rome, Germany, France, Italy, arid England. In 
 some cases the enthusiasm of native students may seem to 
 have carried them too far, and a mixing up of philosophical 
 with religious and theosophic propaganda, inevitable as it 
 is said to be in India, is always dangerous. But such 
 journals as the Pandit, the Brahmavadin, the Light of 
 Truth, and lately the Journal -of the Buddhist Text Society, 
 have been doing most valuable service. What we want 
 are texts and translations, and any information that can 
 throw light on the chronology of Indian philosophy. Nor 
 should their labour be restricted to Sanskrit texts. In the 
 
xx PREFACE 
 
 South of India there exists a philosophical literature which, 
 though it may show clear traces of Sanskrit influence, con- 
 tains also original indigenous elements of great beauty and 
 of great importance for historical ^purposes. Unfortunately 
 few scholars only have taken up, as yet, the study of the 
 Dravidian languages and literature, but young students 
 who complain that there is nothing left to do in Sanskrit 
 literature, would, I believe, find their labours amply re- 
 warded in that field. How much may be done in another 
 direction by students of Tibetan literature in furthering a 
 study of Indian philosophy has lately been proved by the 
 publications of Sarat Chandra Das, C.I.E., and Satis Chandra 
 Acharya Vidyabhushana, M.A., and their friends. 
 
 In conclusion I have to thank Mr. A. E. Gough, the 
 translator of the Vaiseshika-Sutras, and the author of the 
 'Philosophy of the Upanishads,' for his extreme kindness 
 in reading a revise of my proof-sheets. A man of seventy- 
 six has neither the eyes nor the Memory which he had at 
 twenty-six, and he may be allowed to appeal to younger 
 men for such help as he himself in his younger days has 
 often and glady lent to his Gurus and fellow-labourers. 
 
 Oxford, May 1, 1899. F. M. M. 
 
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION 
 
 Though I am aware that the Six Systems of Indian 
 Philosophy, the last large work written by my husband, 
 and published only two months before the beginning of 
 his fatal illness, shows spme signs of weariness, and that 
 the materials are perhaps less clearly gathered up and set 
 before the reader than in his other works, I have had so 
 many letters from friends in India as well as in England, 
 expressing a desire for a second and cheaper edition, that 
 I could not hesitate to comply with Messrs. Longmans' 
 wish to add the 'Six Systems' to the Collected Works. 
 A friend on whose judgement I have complete reliance 
 writes : 'There is nothing like it in English for compre- 
 hensiveness of view, and it will long remain the most 
 valuable introduction to the study of Indian philosophy 
 in our language. It is an astonishing book for one who 
 had passed threescore years and ten.' 
 
 GEORGINA MAX MULLER. 
 August, 1903. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Philosophy and Philosophers . . . . . . 1 
 
 Srutam and Smrztam ....* 
 
 Upanishad-period, from about 700 B.C . . . 4 
 
 Period antecedent to the Upanishads . . . . . 5 
 
 Intellectual Life in ancient India ..... 7 
 
 Kshatriyas and Brahmans ....... 8 
 
 The Evidence of the Upanishads, Ganaka, Agatasatru . . 11 
 
 Agatasatru . . . . . . . . .13 
 
 Buddhist Period. . . . . . . . .14 
 
 Prasenagit and Bimbisara . . . . . . .16 
 
 Brahma-gala-sutta . . . . . . .16 
 
 Mahabharata . . . . . . . . . 21 
 
 Buddha . . . . . . . . . 23 
 
 Greek Accounts. * . , . . . .26 
 
 Buddhist Pilgrims, Hiouen-thsang . . . . . .27 
 
 King Harsha . . . . . . . . 30 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 THE VEDAS 
 
 The Vedas 30 
 
 The Philosophical Basis of the Vedic Gods . . . .35 
 
 Three Classes of Vedic Gods .37 
 
 Other Classifications of Gods . . . . . .38 
 
 The Visve or All-gods. . . . . . . .39 
 
 Tendencies towards Unity among the Gods .... 40 
 
 Henotheism ......... 40 
 
 Monotheism and Monism . . . . . . .41 
 
CONTENTS xxiii 
 
 / 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Pragapati ....... , 42 
 
 Visvakarman . . . . . .43 
 
 Tvashfn . . 43 
 
 Search for a Supreme Deity. .45 
 
 Hymn to the Unknown God. . . . .46 
 
 Brahman, Atman, Tad Ekam . . . 4 ^ 
 Nasadiya Hymn ,... 49 
 
 Brahman, its various Meanings . . . . .52 
 
 Bn'h and Brahman, Word 55 
 
 East and West 58 
 
 Mind and Speech . . . . . . .67 
 
 Atman '. . . . . . . .70 
 
 Pragapati, Brahman, Atman. . . . .72 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 THE SYSTEMS OF PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Growth of Phi losophical^Ideas . . . 74 
 
 Prasthana Bheda . . . . . . . .75 
 
 Literary References in the Upanishads , . . 84 
 
 The Six Systems of Philosophy . . . . ... 85 
 
 Bnhaspati Sutras . . . . . .... 86 
 
 Books of Reference . 87 
 
 Dates of the -Philosophical Sutras . . . . . . 88 
 
 Samkhya-Sutras ........ 90 
 
 Vedanta-Sutras ......... 90 
 
 Mnemonic Literature. . . . . . . .92 
 
 The Bnhaspati-Philosophy . . . . . . . 94 
 
 Common Philosophical Ideas . . * . . .104 
 
 1. Metempsychosis Samsara ... , . . 104 
 
 2. Immortality 'of the Soul. . ..... . . 105 
 
 3. Pessimism . . . . . ... . 106 
 
xxiv CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 4. Kafman ' . . . . . . . .109 
 
 5. Infallibility of the Veda. . . . . . .111 
 
 6. Three Gurcas . . . . . . . .111 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 VEDANTA OR UTTARA-MIMAMSA 
 
 Vedanta or tlttara-Mimawsa . . . . . .113 
 
 Badarayana . . . . . . * .116 
 
 Fundamental Doctrines of the Vedanta . . . . .121 
 
 Translation of the Upanishads . . . \ . 1 3 7 
 
 Character- of the Upanishads . . . . . .139 
 
 Vedanta-Sutras . . . . . . . . . 140 
 
 Appeals to the-Veda . .... . .143 
 
 Praraanas. . . . . . . . . 143 
 
 Pramanas according to the Samkhya . . . . .144 
 
 Pratyaksha , . . . . . . . .144 
 
 Anumana . . . . . . * . * 145 
 
 Sabda * 145 
 
 Authority of the ^Vedas . . , . . 149 
 
 The Meaning of Veda. . . . . .149 
 
 Work-part and Knowledge-part of the Veda . . . .151 
 
 Vidya and Avidya . . . > . . . . .152 
 
 Subject and Object 152 
 
 The Phenomenal Reality of the World ..... 154 
 
 Creation or Causation. . . . . ....155 
 
 Cause and Effect. ..... . . . 156 
 
 Dreaming and Waking . . . . , . .160 
 
 The Higher and the Lower Knowledge . . . . .164 
 
 Is Virtue Essential to Moksha ? . . . . . . 166 
 
 The two Brahmans ... . . . . . .168 
 
 Philospphy and Religion . ..... . , . .171 
 
CONTENTS xxv 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Karrnaft . ' . . . .171 
 
 Brahman is Everything < . . . . . 172 
 
 The Sthula-and Sukshma-sarira? . . . k . ,173 
 
 The Four States . . . . . . . .174 
 
 Eschatology ........ . . . .175 
 
 Freedom in this Life . . ( . . . .180 
 
 Different Ways of Studying Philosophy ; . . . .182 
 
 Ramanuga ... . . . . . .185 
 
 Metaphors 4 . . . . . % , , .195 
 
 CHAPTER V, 
 PURVA-MlMAMSA 
 
 Purva-AlimaHisa . . . . . . t , 197 
 
 Contents of the Purva-Mimamsa . . . . t ,. .200 
 
 Pramanas of Caimini . . . ... .202 
 
 Sutra-style . 203 
 
 Has the Veda a Superhuman Origin ? . . . . .206 
 
 Supposed Atheism of Purva-Mimamsa . . . . . . 210 
 
 Is the Purva-Mimawsa a system of Philosophy ? . . .213 
 
 f 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 SAMKHYA-PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Samkhya-Philosophy ,215 
 
 Later Vedanta mixed with SaTTzkhya . . . . .215 
 
 Relative Age of Philosophies and Sutras. . . /' . 219 
 
 Age of the KapUa-Sutras . , . . . 220 
 
 Samkhya-karikas . . . .... . .222 
 
 Date of Gaurfapada . . . .... . .223 
 
 Tattva-samasa , ..-..- .224 
 
 Anteriority of Vedanta or Samkhya . - . . . t 229 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Atheism ancf Orthodoxy . . . . .. . . * , 231 
 
 Authority of the Veda .232 
 
 Sawkhya hostile to Priesthood . . . . .233 
 
 Parallel development of Philosophical Systems. , . . .235 
 
 Buddhism subsequent to Upanishads . . * .236 
 
 Lalita-vistara . . . . ... . 237 
 
 Ajvaghosha's Buddha-Aarita . . . .237 
 
 Buddhist Suttas . ... . . 238 
 
 A^valayana's Grihya-Sutras .... . * 239 
 
 Did Buddha borrow from Kapila ? . . ,240 
 
 j (J A I 
 
 Bana s Harshafcarita . .' . 
 
 The Tattva-samasa . . . . . .242 
 
 List of Twenty-five Tattvas . . . . . .244 
 
 The Avyakta 245 
 
 Buddhi . . . .246 
 
 Ahamkara . . . ' . 249 
 
 Five Tanmatras . . . . . . 250 
 
 Sixteen Vikaras . . . . . .251 
 
 Five Buddhindriyas . . . . . - - .251 
 
 Five Karmendriyas . . . . . . .252 
 
 Manas 252 
 
 Five Mahabhutas . . . . . . 252 
 
 Purusha . . . . . ... ..253 
 
 Is Purusha an Agent ?..... 255 
 
 Three Gunas , . . . 255 
 
 Is Purusha one or many ? . . . . . . 256 
 
 Vedanta Sayings . . , . . . ,256 
 
 Early Relation between Vedanta and Samkhya * . .258 
 
 Traiguflya . . . , . . .262 
 
 Sanara and PratisanA;ara ...... * 264 
 
CONTENTS xxvii 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Adhyatma, Adhibhuta, Adhidaivata . . . . . 264 
 
 Abhibuddhis (5) . . . r . '. '. . .265 
 
 Karmayonis (5) . . ~ . . ' . ' . ' * i 266 
 
 Vayus (5) '., ', ; . '. -. . . . 267' 
 
 Karmatmans (5) . . . '. . . . 267 
 
 Avidya, Nescience (5) . . .. . . . 268 
 
 Asakti, Weakness (28) . . . . * . 26a 
 
 Atush^i'and Tusha . ... . . . . 269- 
 
 Asiddhis and Siddhis. 269- 
 
 Tushm and Siddhis . . 270 
 
 Mulikarthas 270 
 
 Shashti-tant ra . . . . . . . . .271 
 
 Anugraha-sarga. . . . . .271 
 
 Bhuta-sarga . . . . . k . . .272 
 
 Bandha, Bondage . . . . . . 4 272 
 
 Dakshina-bondage, Gifts to Priests. . . . . .272 
 
 Moksha . . . . . . . . . 27& 
 
 Pramar?as . . , . . . . . .273 
 
 Du/zkha . . . . . . . . . . 274 
 
 The true Meaning of the Sawkhya . . . . . .275- 
 
 Nature of Pain . . '. . ' t . . .276 
 
 Vedanta and Samkhya . . . . . .27^- 
 
 Vedanta, Avidya, and Aviveka . . . . . .280 
 
 Samkhya, Aviveka .... 281 
 
 Atman and Purusha ..... 285- 
 
 Origin of Avidya .... 289 
 
 The Sastra ..... 289^ 
 
 Development of Prakriti, Cosmic . ... 290 
 
 Retrospect ... 290 
 
 Is Samkhya Idealism ? . . . , ^ .293 
 
 Purusha and Prakriti . 295 
 
xxviii CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 296 
 
 State of'Purusha, when Free 
 
 . 297 
 Meaning of ram 
 
 PurUsha 
 
 298 
 Prakriti an Automaton ? 
 
 299 
 Prakrui's Unselfishness . . 
 
 Gross and Subtle Body . . 30 
 
 302 
 The Atheism of Kapila . . . 
 
 304 
 Immorality of the Samkhya . 
 
 305 
 Samkhya Parables ..' 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 YOGA-PHILOSOPHY 
 
 en? 
 
 Yoga and Samkhya . . . 
 
 a r\ O 
 
 Meanings of the word Yoga. . 
 
 O/-VQ 
 
 Yoga, not Union, but Disunion . 
 
 YogaasViveka . . . . .310 
 
 Patangali, Vyasa ' ..313 
 
 3 14 
 Second Century B. C. . 
 
 315 
 Chronology of Thought . . , 
 
 917 
 The Yoga-Philosophy- 
 
 Misconception of the Objects of Yoga . . . .31 
 
 Devotion to Ijvara, Misconceptions . . * .319 
 
 What is Lyvra ? .321 
 
 Kapi la's Real Arguments . . . .327 
 
 The Theory of Karman 33 
 
 The four Books of Yoga-Sutras . . . . ... 334 
 
 True Object of Yoga . . . . . . .335 
 
 Xitta . . . . . . . .336 
 
 Functions of the Mind . . . . .337 
 
 Exercises. . . .338 
 
CONTENTS xxix 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Dispassion, Vairagya . ..... . 333. 
 
 Meditation With or Without an Object . . . . .341 
 
 Ijvara once more . . . . . . . 343 
 
 Other Means of obtaining Samadhi . , . . 344 
 
 Samadhi Apragnata . . . ... . .347 
 
 Kaivalya, Freedom . . . . . .347 
 
 Yogangas, Helps to Yoga . . . ... .348 
 
 Vibhutis, Powers ........ 349 
 
 Samyama and Siddhis . . . . . . .350 
 
 Miracles .... . * . . . . 352 
 
 True Yoga . . ...... . 355 
 
 The Three Gunas . ...'... 357 
 
 Sawskaras and Vasanas . . . . . . . 357 
 
 Kaivalya .3^9 
 
 Is Yoga Nihilism ? . . . . . . . 359 
 
 CHAPTER VIIL 
 NYAYA AND VAISESHIKA 
 
 Relation between Nyaya and Vaueshika . . . .362 
 
 Dignaga . . . . . . . 364 
 
 Bibliography *. . J . ... . . , 368 
 
 Nyaya-Philosophy . . . . . . . 369 
 
 Summum Bonum . . . . . . . 370 
 
 Means of Salvation . . . . . [ . 373 
 
 The Sixteen Topics or Padarthas . . . . . .374 
 
 Means of Knowledge . . . . . ,374 
 
 Objects of Knowledge ...... 375 
 
 Padartha, Object . . . . . t t .376 
 
 Six Padarlhas of Vaijeshika . . . , * ' . 376 
 
 Madhava's Account of Nyaya . 4 . . . t .377 
 
xxx CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. Pramana . . * * * ' 3 ^ 8 
 Perception or Pratyaksha . . . .379 
 Inference or Anumana . . . * .379 
 Comparison or Upamana . . . . . .382 
 Word or Sabda 382 
 
 II. Prameya . . ... . ' . . .382 
 
 III. Sawwaya ' . . .385 
 
 IV. Prayogana. V. Drtshmnta. VI. SMdhanta . . .385 
 
 VII. The Avayavas, or Members of a Syllogism . . . 385 
 Indian and Greek Logic ....... 386 
 
 VIII. Tarka . . .... . . .388 
 
 IX. Nirnaya .388 
 
 X-XVI. Vada, Galpa, Vitanda, Hetvabhasa, Gati, 'Khala, Nigra- 
 
 hasthana . . . 389 
 
 Judgments on Indian Logic . . . . . .390 
 
 The Later Books of the Nyaya . . . . .391 
 
 Pratyaksha, Perception . . . . . . .392 
 
 Time Present, fPast, Future . . . . . .393 
 
 Upamana, Comparison . . . . . . .394 
 
 5"abda, the Word ... . . . . . 394 
 
 The Eight Pramanas . , .... . .395 
 
 Thoughts on Language * .... . .397 
 
 Spho/a . . . . . . . . i 402 
 
 W r ords express the Summun Genus . . . . .405 
 
 Words expressive of Genera or Individuals ? . . . . 406 
 
 All Words mean TO o ^ . . . . , . 406 
 
 Vedanta on Spho/a . . . . . .410 
 
 Yoga and Sawkhya on Spho.'a .... . . .412 
 
 Nyaya on Spho/a . ... . . . .413 
 
 Vaueshika on Sphote . . . . . . . .414 
 
 Prame^as, Objects pf Kno.w ledge . . . ..415 
 
CONTENTS xxxi 
 
 PAGE 
 Indriyas, Senses .... ... 415 
 
 ,9arira, Body ...... 416 
 
 Manas, Mind . . . * .416 
 
 Atman - 419 
 
 Memory . . . . .419 
 
 Knowledge not Eternal . . . . . . .421 
 
 More Prameyas. . . . . . . . .421 
 
 Life after Death 422 
 
 Existence of Deity . . . . . . 422 
 
 Cause and Effect 423 
 
 Phala, Rewards 425 
 
 Emancipation ......... 425 
 
 Knowledge of Ideas, not of things . . . . . .426 
 
 Syllogism . .427 
 
 Pramanas in different Philosophical Schools . . . .428 
 
 Anumana for Others . . . . . . . .431 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 VALS-ESHIKA PHILOSOPHY 
 
 Date of Sutras . . . . . . . . . 433 
 
 Dates from Tibetan Sources. . . . . . 439 
 
 Karcada .......... 449 
 
 Substances ....... 441 
 
 Qualities ...... 44! 
 
 Actions ....... 442 
 
 Cause ...... 443 
 
 Qualities Examined . . . . . . .443 
 
 Time 444 
 
 S P ace 444 
 
 Manas ... 445 
 
 Anus or Atoms .... . 445 
 
xxxii CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 . 447 
 Samanya. 
 
 Vuesha . . ......... 447 
 
 . 447 
 
 Samavaya .... 
 
 Abhava . . ..'--. 
 
 The Six Systems . . 
 
 461 
 INDEX . . ... . . - . 
 
INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 
 
 Philosophy and Philosophers. 
 
 WHILE in most countries a history of philosophy is 
 inseparable from a history of philosophers, in India we 
 have indeed ample materials for watching the origin and 
 growth of philosophical ideas, but hardly any for studying 
 the lives or characters of those who founded or supported 
 the philosophical systems of that country. Their work 
 has remained and continues to live to the present day, but 
 of the philosophers themselves hardly anything remains 
 to us beyond their names. Not even their dates can be 
 ascertained with any amount of certainty. In Greece, 
 from the earliest times, the simplest views of the world 
 and of the destinies of man, nay even popular sayings, 
 maxims of morality and worldly wisdom, and wise saws 
 of every kind, even though they contained nothing very 
 original or personal, were generally quoted as the utter- 
 ances of certain persons or at least ascribed to certain 
 names, such as the Seven Sages, so as to have something 
 like a historical background. We have some idea of who 
 Thales was. and who was Plato, where and when they 
 lived, and what they did ; but of Kapila, the supposed 
 founder of the Smkhya philosophy, of Patafyali, the 
 founder of the Yoga, of Gotama and Ka^ada, of Badara- 
 yana and (raimini, we know next to nothing, and what 
 we know hardly ever rests on contemporary and trust- 
 worthy evidence. Whether any of these Indian philosophers 
 lived at the same time and in the same place, whether they 
 were friends or enemies, whether some were the pupils and 
 
2 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 others the teachers, all this is unknown to us, nor do I see 
 any chance of our ever knowing more about them than we 
 do at present. We read that Thales warned King Croesus, 
 we are told that Empedocles finished liis days by throwing 
 himself into the flames of Aetna, we know that Socrates 
 drank poison, arid that Anaxagoras was the friend of 
 Pericles, but there is nothing to connect the names of the 
 ancient Indian philosophers with any historical events, 
 with any political characters,, or with dates before the 
 time of Buddha. 
 
 It is quite true that every literary composition, whether 
 in prose or in poetry, presupposes an individual author, 
 that no poem makes itself, and no philosophical syatem is 
 elaborated by the people at large. But on the other hand, 
 no poet makes himself, no philosopher owes everything to 
 himself. He grows from a soil that is ready made for 
 him, and he breathes an intellectual atmosphere which is 
 not of his own making. The Hindus seem to have felt 
 this indebtedness of the individuals to those before and 
 around them far more strongly than the Greeks, who, if 
 they cannot find a human author, have recourse even to 
 mythological and divine personages in order to have 
 a pedestal, a name, and an authority for every great 
 thought and every great invention of antiquity. The 
 Hindus are satisfied with giving us the thoughts, and leave 
 us to find out their antecedents as best we can. 
 
 /Sxntam and Smritasn. 
 
 The Hindus have divided the whole of their ancient 
 literature into two parts, which really mean two periods, 
 jSrutam, what was heard, and was not the work of men or 
 any personal being, human or divine, and Smritam, what 
 was remembered, and has always been treated as the work 
 of an individual, whether man or god. $rutam or Sruti 
 came afterwards to mean what has been revealed, exactly 
 as we understand that word, while Smritam or Smriti 
 comprised all that was recognised as possessing human 
 authority only, so that if there ever was a conflict between 
 the two, Smriti or tradition might at once be overruled by 
 what was called $ruti or revelation. 
 
#RITTAM AND SM/KTAM. 3 
 
 It is curious, however, to observe how the revealed 
 literature, of the Hindus, such as the hymns of the 
 Rig-veda, have in later times been ascribed to certain 
 families, nay even to individual poets, though many of 
 the names of these poets are clearly fictitious. Nor are 
 even these fictitious poets supposed to have created or 
 composed their poems, but only to have seen them as they 
 were revealed to them by a higher power, commonly called 
 Brahman, or the Word, What we call philosophy in its 
 eystematie form, is, from an Indian point of view, not 
 revealed, /Srutam, but belongs to Smriti or tradition. 
 We possess it in carefully composed and systematically 
 elaborated manuals, in short aphorisms or Sutras or in 
 metrical Karikas, ascribed to authors of whom we hardly 
 know anything, a-nd followed by large commentaries or 
 independent treatises which are supposed to contain the 
 outcome of a continuous tradition going back, to very 
 ancient times, to the Sutra, nay even to the Br&hmawa 
 period, though in their present form they are confessedly 
 the work .of medieval or modern writers. In the Sutras 
 each system of philosophy is complete, and elaborated in 
 its minutest details. There is no topic within the sphere 
 of philosophy which does not find a clear or straightforward 
 treatment in these short Sutras. The Sfttra style, imperfect 
 as it is from a literary point of view, would be invaluable 
 to us in other systems of philosophy, such as Hegel's or 
 PJato's. We should always know where we are, and we 
 should never hear of a philosopher who declared on his 
 deathbed that no one had understood him, nor of antago- 
 nistic schools, diverging from and appealing to the same 
 teacher. One thing must be quite clear to every attentive 
 reader of these Sfttras, namely, that they represent the last 
 result of a long continued study of philosophy, carried on 
 for centuries in the forests and hermitages of India. The 
 ideas which are shared by all the systems of Indian philo- 
 sophy, the large number of technical terms possessed by 
 them in common or peculiar to each system, can leave no 
 doubt on this subject. Nor can we doubt that for a long 
 time the philosophical thoughts of India were embodied in 
 wha-t I call a Mnemonic Literature. Writing for literary 
 
 B c 
 
4 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 purposes was unknown in India before the rise of 
 Buddhism, and even at the Buddhist Councils when 
 their Sacred Canon, the Tripitfaka, was settled, we hear 
 nothing as yet of paper, ink, and reeds, but only of oral 
 and even musical repetition. The very name of a Council 
 was Samgiti or Mahasamgiti, i.e. singing together, and the 
 different parts of the Canon were not consigned to writing, 
 but rehearsed by certain individuals. Whenever there 
 arose a dispute as to the true, teaching of Buddha, it was 
 not settled by an appeal to any MS., but an invitation 
 was addressed to a member of the Samgha who knew the 
 text by heart. It is actually mentioned that the Southern 
 Canon was not reduced to writing till the first century B. c., 
 under King Va^agamani, about 80 B.C. Nothing can be 
 more explicit than the statement in the chronicles of Ceylon 
 on that point : ' Before this time the wise monks had 
 handed down the texts of the Tipiaka orally ; and also 
 the Atf^akatha (commentary). At this time the monks, 
 perceiving the decay of beings (not MSS.), assembled, and 
 in order that the Law might endure for a long time, they 
 caused it to be written down in books/ Such a state of 
 things is difficult for us to imagine, still if we wish to 
 form a true idea of the intellectual state of India in pre- 
 Buddhistic times, we must accustom ourselves to the idea 
 that all that could be called literature then was mnemonic 
 only, carefully guarded by a peculiar and very strict 
 educational discipline, but of course exposed to all the 
 inevitable chances of oral tradition. That Mnemonic Period 
 existed for philosophy as well as for everything else, and 
 if we have to begin our study of Indian philosophy with 
 the Stitras, these Sutras themselves must be considered as 
 the last outcome of a long continued philosophical activity 
 carried on by memory only. 
 
 JDTpanishad-period, from about 700 B.C. 
 
 But while the Sutras give us abstracts of the variouc 
 systems of philosophy, ready made, there must have been, 
 nay there was, one period, previous to the Stitras, during 
 which we can watch something like growth, like life and 
 strife, in Indian philosophy, and that is the last stage , 
 
UPANI SHAD-PEEIOD. 5 
 
 of the Vedic period, as represented to us in the 
 Upanishads. 
 
 For gaining an insight into the early growth of Indian 
 philosophic thought, this period is in fact the most valu- 
 able; though of systematised philosophy, in our sense of 
 the word, it contains, as yet, little or nothing. As we can 
 feel that there is electricity in the air, and that there will 
 be a storm, we feel, on reading the Upanishads, that there 
 is philosophy in the Indian mind, and that there will be 
 thunder and lightning to follow soon. Nay, I should even 
 go a step further. In order to be able to account for what 
 seem to us more sparks of thought, mere guesses at truth, 
 we are driven to admit a long familiarity with philosophic 
 problems before the time that gave birth to the Upanishads 
 which we possess. 
 
 Period antecedent to the Upanishads. 
 
 The Upanishads contain too many technical terms, such 
 as Brahman, Atman, Dharma, Yrata, Yoga, Mimawsa, and 
 many more, to allow us to suppose that they were the 
 products of one day or of one generation. Even if the 
 later systems of philosophy did not so often appeal them- 
 selves to the Upanishads as their authorities, we could 
 easily see for ourselves that, though flowing in very 
 different directions, like the Ganges and the Indus, these 
 systems of philosophy can all be traced back to the same 
 distant heights from which they took their rise. And as 
 India was fertilised, not only by the Ganges and Indus, 
 but by ever so many rivers and rivulets, all pointing to the 
 Snowy Mountains in the North, we can see the Indian 
 mind also being nourished through ever so many channels, 
 all starting from a vast accumulation of religious and 
 philosophic thought of which we seem to see the last 
 remnants only in our Upanishads, while the original 
 springs are lost to us for ever. 
 
 If some of the seeds and germs of philosophy could be 
 discovered, as has been hastily thought, among the savage 
 tribes of to-day, nothing would be' more welcome to the 
 historian of philosophy,' but until these tribes have been 
 classified according to language, we must leave these 
 
6 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 dangerous enterprises to others. For the present w# must 
 be satisfied with the germs of thought such as we find 
 them in the Upanishads, and in the archives of language 
 which reach back far beyond the Upanishads and even 
 beyond the folklore of Khonds, Bhils, and Koles. 
 
 It is true that during that distant period which we eun 
 watch in the Upanishads, philosophy was not yet separated 
 from religion ; but the earliest religion, at least among the 
 speakers of Aryan languages, serins always to have been not 
 only the first religion, but the first philosophy also, of the 
 races that had taken possession of India, as well as of 
 the best soil of Asia and Europe. If it is ihe object of 
 philosophy to discover the causes of things, 'rerwn co- 
 gnoscere eausas, what was the creation of the earliest mytho- 
 logical gods but an attempt to explain the causes of light, 
 of fire, of dawn, of day and night, of rain and thunder, by 
 postulating agents for every one of them, and calling them 
 Dyaus or Agni, light or fire, Ushas, dawn, the Asvins, day 
 and night, Indra, the sky-god, a,nd calling all of them 
 Devas, the Bright, or dii, the gods ? Here are the first 
 feeders of the idea of the Godhead, whatever tributaries it 
 may have received afterwards. Of course, that distant 
 period to which we have to assign this earliest growth of 
 language, thought, religion, law, morals, and philosophy, 
 has left us no literary monuments. Here and there we 
 can discover faint traces in language, indicating the foot- 
 prints left by the strides of former giants. But in India, 
 where we have so little to guide us in our historical re- 
 searches, it is of great importance to remember that there 
 was such a distant period of nascent thought ; and that, if 
 at a later time we meet with the same ideas and words 
 turning up in different systems, whether of religion or 
 philosophy, we should be careful not to conclude at once 
 that they must have been borrowed by one system from 
 the other, forgetting that there was an ancient reservoir of 
 thought from which all could have drawn and drank. 
 
 Considering how small our historical information is as 
 to the intellectual and social life of India at different times 
 of its history, it is essential that we should carefully gather 
 whatever there is, before we attempt to study Indian 
 
INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN ANCIENi INDIA. 7 
 
 philosophy in its differentiated and systematised system^. 
 Mueh^of our information may represent a chaos only, but 
 we want such a chaos in order to understand the kosmos 
 that followed. 
 
 Intellectual Life in ancient India. 
 
 In certain chapters of the BrahmaTias and in the Upani- 
 shads we see a picture of the social and intellectual life 
 of India at that early time, which seems fully to justify 
 the saying th<< b India has "always been a nation of philo- 
 sophers. The picture which these sacred books give us 
 of the seething thoughts of that country may at first sight 
 seeni fanciful and almost incredible ; but because the men 
 of ancient India, as they are there represented to us, if 
 by tradition only, are different from Greeks and Romans 
 and from ourselves, it does not follow that we have not 
 before us a faithful account of what really existed at one 
 time in the land of the Five or Seven Bivere. Why should 
 these accounts have been invented, unless they contained 
 a certain verisimilitude in the eyes of the people? It is 
 quite clear that they were not composed, as some people 
 seem to imagine, in order to impose after two thousands 
 of years on us, the scholars of Europe, or on anybody else. 
 The idea that the ancient nations of the world wished to 
 impose on us, that they wished to appear more ancient 
 than they were, more heroic, more marvellous, more en T 
 lightened, is an absurd fancy. They did not even think 
 of us, and had no word as yet for posterity. Such thoughts 
 belong to much later times, and even then we woudei 
 rather how a local, not to say, provincial poet like Horack 
 should have thought so much of ages to come. We must 
 not allow such ideas of f raud and forgery to spoil our 
 'fyitik and our interest in ancient history. The ancients 
 thought much more of themselves than of the nations of 
 the distant future. If, however, what the ancients tell us 
 about their own times, or about the past which could never 
 have extended very far back, seems incredible to us, we 
 should, always try first of all to understand it as possible, 
 before we reject it as impossible and as an intentional 
 fraud. That in very early times kings and nobles and 
 
8 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 sages in India should have been absorbed in philosophical 
 questions seems no doubt strange to us, because the energies 
 of the people of Europe, as far back as we know anything 
 about them, have always been divided between practical 
 and intellectual pursuits, the former, in ancient times, con- 
 siderably preponderating over the latter. But why should 
 not a different kind of life have been possible in a country 
 which, without much effort on the part of its cultivators, 
 yielded in abundance all that was necessary for the support 
 of life, which was protected oii three sides by the silver- 
 streaks of the* ocean, and on the fourth by almost impassable 
 mountain barriers, a country whicli for thousands of years 
 was free from war except the war of extermination directed 
 against barbarous tribes, the so-called sons of the soil? 
 After all, to thoughtful people, finding themselves placed 
 on this planet, they did not know how or why, it was not 
 so very far-fetched a problem, particularly while there was 
 as yet no struggle for life, to ask who they were, whence 
 they came, and what they were intended' for here on earth. 
 Thus we read at the beginning of the /SVetasvatara-upani- 
 sliad : ' Whence are we born '? Whereby do we live, and 
 whither do we go? O ye who know Brahman, (tell us) 
 at whose command we abide here, whether in pain or in 
 pleasure 1 Should time or nature, or necessity, or chance, 
 or the elements be considered as the cause, or He who is 
 called Purusha, the man, that is, the Supreme Spirit l '? ' 
 
 Xshntriyas and Brahmans. 
 
 It might be thought that all this was due to the elevating 
 influence of an intellectual aristocracy, such as we find 
 from very early times to the present day in India, the 
 Brahmans. But this is by no means the case. The so- 
 called Kshatriyas or military nobility take nearly as active 
 a part in the intellectual life of the country as the Brahmans 
 themselves. The fact is that we have to deal in the earlier 
 period of ancient India with two rather than with four 
 castes and their numerous subdivisions. 
 
 This term ca&tt has proved most mischievous and mis- 
 
 1 Sec also Anugita, chap. XX ; S. B. E., Vlil, p. 311. 
 
KSHATRIYAS AND BRAHMANS. 9 
 
 leading, and the less we avail ourselves of it the better 
 we shall be able to understand the true state of society 
 in the ancient times of India. Caste is, of course, a Portu- 
 guese word, and was applied from about the middle of the 
 sixteenth century by rough Portuguese sailors to certain 
 divisions of Indian society which had struck their fancy. 
 It had before been used in the sense of breed or stock, 
 originally in the sense of a pure or unmixed breed. In 
 1613 Purchas speaks of the thirty and odd several castes 
 of the Banians (Va.?vi#). To ask what caste means in India 
 would be like asking what caste means in England, or 
 what fetish (feitico) means in Portugal. What we really 
 want to know is what was implied by such Indian words 
 as Varna (colour), (Jati (kith), to say nothing of Sapi?wZ- 
 atva or Samanodakatva, Kula (family), Gotra (race), Pra- 
 vara (lineage) ; otherwise we shall have once more the same 
 confusion about the social organisation of ancient India 
 as about African fetishism or North American totemism! 
 Each foreign word should always be kept to its own native 
 meaning, or, if generalised for scientific purposes, it should 
 be most carefully defined afresh. Otherwise every social 
 distinction will be called caste, eveiy stick a totem, every 
 idol a fetish. 
 
 We have in India the Aryan settlers on one side, and 
 the native inhabitants on the other. The former are named 
 Aryas or Aryas, that is, cultivators of the soil which they 
 had conquered ; the latter, if submissive to their conquerors, 
 are the jS'udras 1 or Dasas, slaves, while the races of indi- 
 genous origin who remained hostile to the end, were classed 
 as altogether outside the pale of political society. The 
 Aryas in India were naturally differentiated like other 
 people into an intellectual or priestly aristocracy, the 
 Brahmans, and a fighting or ruling aristocracy, the Ksha- 
 triyas, while the great bulk remained simply Vis or Vaisyas, 
 that is, householders and cultivators of the soil, and after- 
 wards merchants and mechanics also. To the very last 
 
 1 Thus we read as early as the Mnhabharata 'The three qualities abide 
 in the three castes thus : darkness in the S'udni, passion in the Kshatriya, 
 and the highest, goodness, in the Brahinafta.' (Aiiugita, S. B. E., VIII, 
 P- 329-) 
 
IO INDIAN PHILOSOPHY 
 
 the three great divisions, Brahmans, Kshatriyas^ and 
 Vaisyas, shared certain privileges and duties in common. 
 Originally they were all of them called twice-born, and 
 not only allowed, but obliged to be educated in Vedic 
 knowledge and to pass through the three or four Asramas 
 or stages of life. Thus we read in the Mahabharata : ' The 
 order of Vanaprasthas, of sages who dwell in forests and 
 live on fruits, roots, and air is prescribed for the three 
 twice-born (classes) ; the order of householders is prescribed 
 for all.' (Anugita, S. B. E. ; VIII, p. 310.; While the divi^ 
 sion into Aryas and Dasas was due to descent, that into 
 Brahmans, Kshatriyas, and Vaisyas seems originally to 
 have been due to occupation only, though it may soon 
 have acquired an hereditary character. The Brahmans 
 had to look after the welfare of souls? the Kshatriyas after 
 the welfare of the body politic, and the Vaisyas represented 
 originally the undifferentiated mass of the people, engaged 
 in the ordinary occupations of an incipient civilisation. 
 The later subdivision of Indian society, as described by 
 Manu, and as preserved under different forms to the present 
 day, does not concern us for our present purpose. The 
 lessons which the names of Varna (colour) and (Jati (genus) 
 teach us had long been forgotten even in Manu's time, and 
 are buried at present under a heavy heap of rubbish. Still 
 even that rubbish heap deserves to be sifted, as I believe 
 it is now being sifted by scholars like Mr. Risley and 
 others. 
 
 In ancient times neither Kshatriyas nor Vai&yas were 
 excluded from taking part in those religious and philo- 
 sophical struggles, which seem to have occupied India far 
 more than wars of defence or conquest. Nay women also 
 claimed a right to be heard in their philosophical assem- 
 blies. The Kshatriyas never surrendered their right to 
 take part in the discussions of the great problems of life 
 and death, and they occasionally asserted it with great 
 force and dignity. Besides, the strong reaction against 
 priestly supremacy came at lafct from them, for we must 
 'not iorgot that Buddha also was a Kshatriya, a prince of 
 Kapilavastu, and that his chief opposition, from a social 
 and political point of view, was against the privileges of 
 
KING KANAKA. IX 
 
 leaching and sacrificing, claimed by the Brahmans as their 
 exclusive property and against the infallible and divine 
 character ascribed by them to their Vedas. 
 
 Che Evidence of the Upaaishads, (raxtaka, 
 
 If we look back once more to the intellectual life of 
 India in the ancient Vedic times, or at least in the times 
 represented to us in the Upanishads, we read there of an 
 ancient King Garaka, whose fame at the time when the 
 Upauishads were composed had^ already spread far and 
 wide (Kaush. Up. IV, i ; Brih. Ar. Up. II, i, i). He was 
 a king of the Videhas, his capital was Mithila, and his 
 daughter, Sita, is represented to us in later times as the 
 famous wife of Rama (Rarnapurvatap. Up.). But in the 
 Upanishads he is represented, not as a successful genera. I 
 or conqueror, not so much as a brave knight, victorious 
 in chivalrous tournaments. We read of him as taking 
 part in metaphysical discussions, as presiding over philo- 
 sophical councils, as bestowing his patronage on the most 
 eminent sages of his kingdom, as the friend of Ya(//?avalkya, 
 one of the most famous philosophical teachers of the 
 Upaninhad period. When performing 1 a great sacrifice, 
 this king sets apart a day for a B rah mod yam, a dispu- 
 tation in which philosophers, such as Ya<7//avalkya, Asvala, 
 Artabhaga, and even women, such as Gargi, the daughter 
 of Va&aknu (Brih. Ar. Up. Ill, i, 5), take an active part. 
 To the victor in these disputations the king promised 
 a reward of a thousand cows with ten pa das of gold fixed 
 to, their horns. As Yagr/?avalkya claimed these cows on 
 account of his superior knowledge, the other Brahmans 
 present propounded a number of questions which he was 
 expected to answer in order to prove his superiority. And 
 BO he does. The first question is how a man who offers 
 a sacrifice can be freed thereby from the fetters of death. 
 Then follow questions such as, While death swallows the 
 whole world, who is the deity that shall swallow death? 
 What becomes of the vital spirits when a man dies ? What 
 is it that does not forsake man in the hour of death? 
 
 * Kaushitaki Up. IV, i. ; B/rh. Ar. Up. Ill, i. 
 
12 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 What becomes of man after his speech at death has entered 
 the fire, his breath the wind, his eye the sun, his A mind the 
 moon, his ear space, his body the earth, his Atman the 
 ether, the hairs of his body the herbs, the hair of his head 
 the trees, his blood and seed the \vaters ? Whither did the 
 descendants of King Parikshit go? What* is the soul? 
 What contains the worlds? Who rules everything and 
 yet is different from everything? Far be it from me to 
 say that these and other questions were answered by 
 Ya#r7avalkya in a manner x that would seem satisfactory 
 to ourselves. What is important to us is that such ques- 
 tions should have been asked at all, that they should have 
 formed the staple of public discussion at that early time, 
 a time previous to the establishment qf Buddha's religion 
 in India, in the fifth century B.C.. and that his answers 
 should have satisfied his contemporaries. 7'iere is no other 
 country in the world where in such ancient times such 
 disputations would have been thought of, unless it were 
 in Egypt. Neither Menelaos nor Priam would have pre- 
 sided over them, neither Achilles nor Ulysses would have 
 shone in them. That these disputations took place in 
 public and in the presence of the king we have no reason 
 to doubt. Besides, there is one passage (Brih. Ar. Up. Ill, 
 2, 13) where we are A told expressly that th$ two disputants, 
 Yarpavalkya arid Artabhaga, retired into a private place 
 in order to come to an understanding about one question 
 which, as they thought, did not admit of being discussed 
 in public. 
 
 Do we know of any other country where at that early 
 time such religious congresses would have been thought of, 
 and royal rewards bestowed on those who were victorious 
 in these philosophical tournaments ? 
 
 One of the sayings of 6?anaka has remained famous in 
 Indian literature for ever, and deserves to remain so. Whe-n 
 his capital, Mithila, was destroyed by a conflagration, he 
 turned round and said, ' While Mithila is burning,jaothing 
 that is mine is burnt.' 
 
 Very curious is another feature, that, namely, in these 
 public assemblies not only was a royal reward bestowed 
 on the victor but the vanquished was sometimes threatened 
 
AtfATASATRTT. 13 
 
 with losing his head 1 . Nor was this a threat only, but 
 it actually happened, we are told, in the case of >Sakalya 
 (B^h. Ar. Up. Ill, 9, 26). Must we withhold our belief 
 from such statements, because we have learnt to doubt 
 the burnt hand of Mucius Scaevola and the suicide of 
 Lucretia? I believe not, for the cases are not quite 
 parallel. 
 
 Besides these public disputations, we also read of private 
 conferences in which Ya///7avalkya enlightens his royal 
 patron (?anaka, and after receiving every kind of present 
 from him is told at last that the king gives him the whole 
 of his kingdom, nay surrenders himself to him as his slave. 
 We may call all this exaggerated, but we have no right to 
 call it mere invention, for such stories would hardly have 
 been invented, if they had sounded as incredible in India 
 itself as they sound to us. (Br?'h. IV, 4, 23.) 
 
 It is true we meet in the Upanishads with philosophical 
 dialogues between gods and men also, such as Kaush. Up. 
 Ill, i, between Indra and Pratardana, between Sanatku- 
 mara, the typical warrior deity, and Narada, the repre- 
 sentative of the Br&hmans, between Pragapati, Indra, and 
 Virofcana, between Yama, the god of death, and Naiiketas. 
 But though these are naturally mere inventions, such as 
 we find everywhere in ancient times, it does not follow 
 that the great gatherings of Indian sages presided over by 
 their kings should be equally imaginary. Even imagina- 
 tion requires a certain foundation in fact. 
 
 We have a record of another disputation between a King 
 A^atasatru and the Brahman Balaki, and here again it is 
 the king who has to teach the Brahman, not vice versa. 
 
 A<7&tasatru was king of Kasi (Benares), and must have 
 been later than (?anaka, as he appeals to his fame as widely 
 established. When he has convinced Balaki of the insuffi- 
 
 1 I translate vi pat by l to fall off,' not by < to burst,* and the causative 
 by * to maJte fall off,' i. e. to cut off. Would not ' to bucst ' have been 
 vipaf? 
 
 8 Kaushitaki Up. IV, a ; Erik. ir. Up. II, i. 
 
14 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 ciency of the information which this learned Br&hman 
 had volunteered to impart to him, the proud Braliman 
 actually declares himself the pupil of the king *. 
 
 I do not mean, however, to deny that originally the rela- 
 tion between the kings and the sages of ancient India was 
 that which we see represented, for instance, in the case of 
 King ffanasruti and the Brahman Raikva, who contemptu- 
 ously rejects all offers of friendship from the king, till at 
 last the king, "has fco offer him not only gold and laud (the 
 Raikvapama villages in the country of the Mah&vrshas) 
 but his own daughter, in order to secure his amity and hifl 
 instruction. But though this may have been the original 
 relation between Brahmans and Kshatriyas, and remained 
 so to the time represented by M'anu's Law-book, the warrior 
 class had evidently from a very early time produced a 
 number of independent thinkers who were able to grapple 
 with and to hold their own against the priests, nay, who 
 were superior to them particularly in one subject, as we 
 are told, namely, in their knowledge of the A turns, the 
 Self, In the Maitrayana-upanishad we read of King Brih- 
 adratha who gives up his kingdom, retires into the forest, 
 and is instructed by the sage S&kayanya, whose name may 
 contain the first allusion to $akas and their descendants in 
 India. Such a royal pupil would naturally in the course 
 of his studies become a sage and teacher himself. 
 
 Again, in the Kh&nd. Up, V, 1 1 we see a number of 
 eminent Brahmans approaching King Asvapati Kaikeya, 
 and making themselves his pupils. The question which 
 they discuss is, What is our Self and what is Brahman 
 (V, ii, i) ? and this question the king was supposed t j be 
 able to answer better than any of the Brahmans. 
 
 Buddhist Period. 
 
 When we leave the period represented by the Upani- 
 shads, and turn our eyes to tha/fc which follows and which 
 is marked by the rise and growth of Buddhism, we find no 
 
 1 See also the dialogue between Sanatkumara and Narada (JEMnd. Up. 
 VII, a, i). 
 
BUDDHIST PERIOD. 15 
 
 very sudden change in the intellectual life of the country, 
 as represented to us In the Sacred writings of the Buddhists. 
 Though there is every reason to suppose that their sacred 
 code, the original text of the Tripifaka, belongs to the third 
 century B.C., and was settled and recited, though not written 
 down, during the reign of Asoka, we know at all events 
 that it was reduced to writing in the first century before 
 our era, and we may therefore safely accept its descriptions 
 as giving us a true picture of what took, place in India 
 while Buddhism was slowly but surely supplanting the 
 religion of the Veda, even in its latest offshoots, the Upani- 
 shads. It seems to me a fact of the highest importance 
 that *he Buddhists at the time when their Suttas were 
 composed, were acquainted with the Upanishads and the 
 Sutras, at all events with the very peculiar names of these 
 literary compositions. We must not, however, suppose that 
 as soon as Buddhism arose Vedism disappeared from the 
 soil of India, India is a large country, and Vedism may 
 have continued to flourish in the West while Buddhism 
 was gaining its wonderful triumphs in the East and the 
 South. We have no reason to doubt that some of the later 
 Upanishads were composed long after King Asoka had 
 extended his patronage to the Buddhist fraternity. Nay, 
 if we consider that Buddha died about 477 B.C., we # are 
 probably not far wrong if we look upon the doctrines to 
 which he gave form and life, as represented originally by 
 one of the many schools of thought which were springing 
 up in India during the period of the Upanishads, and which 
 became later on the feeders of what are called in India th,e 
 six great systems of philosophy. Buddha, however, if we 
 may retain that name for the, young prince of Kapilavastu, 
 who actually gave up his palace and made himself a beggar, 
 was not satisfied with teaching a philosophy, his ambition 
 was to found a new society. His object was to induce 
 people to withdraw from the world and to live a life of 
 abstinence and meditation in hermitages or monasteries. 
 The description of the daily life of these Buddhist monks, 
 and even of the Buddhist laity, including kings and nobles, 
 may seem to us at first sight as incredible as what we saw 
 before in the Upanishads. 
 
1 6 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Prosenagit and Bimbisara. 
 
 We read in the Tripitfaka, the sacred code of the Buddhists, 
 of King Prasenagit, of Kosala, drawing near to Buddha and 
 sitting down respectfully at one side before venturing to 
 ask him a question (Samyutta Nikaya III, I, 4). We read 
 likewise of King Bimbisara, of Magadha,. showing the same 
 respect and veneration to this poor monk before asking 
 him any questions or making any suggestions to him. 
 Bante or -Lord is the title by which the paramount 
 sovereigns of India address these mendicants, the followers 
 of Buddha. 
 
 Brahma-^ala- su t ta . 
 
 If we want to get an idea of the immense wealth and 
 variety of philosophic thought by which Buddha found 
 himself surrounded on every side, we cannot do better 
 than consult one of the many Suttas or sermons, supposed 
 to have been preached by Buddha himself, and now forming 
 part of the Buddhist canon, such as, for instance, the 
 Brahma-<7ala-sutta *. 
 
 We are too apt to imagine that both the believers in the 
 Veda and the followers of Buddha formed compact bodies, 
 each being held together by generally recognised articles 
 of faith. But this can hardly have been so, as we read in 
 the Brahma-#ala-sutta that even among the disciples who 
 followed Buddha, some, such as Brahmadatta, spoke in 
 support of Buddha, in support of his doctrines and his 
 disciples, while others, such as Suppiya, spoke openly 
 against all the three. Though there was a clear line of 
 demarcation between Brahmans and Samanas or Buddhists, 
 as far as their daily life and outward ceremonial were 
 concerned, the two are constantly addressed together by 
 Buddha, particularly when philosophical questions are 
 discussed. BrahmaTia is often used by him as a mere 
 expression of high social rank, and he who is most eminent 
 in knowledge and virtue is even by Buddha himself called 
 
 1 We possess now an excellent translation of this Sutta by Rhys Davids. 
 The earlier translations by Gogerly, by Grimblot (Sept Suttas Palis, 1876), 
 were very creditable for the time when they were made, but have now 
 been superseded. 
 
B-RAH? * A-0ALA-SUTTA. I J 
 
 1 a true BrahmaTia.' Brahman with us is often used in 
 two senses which should be kept distinct, meaning, either 
 a member of the first caste, or one belonging to the three 
 castes of the twice-born Aryas, who are under the spiritual 
 sway of the Brahmans. 
 
 We must try to get rid of the idea that Brahmans and 
 Buddhists were always at daggers drawn, and divided the 
 whole of India between themselves. Their relation was 
 not originally very different from that between different 
 ystems of philosophy, such as the Vedanta and Samkhya, 
 which, though they differed, were but seldom inflamed 
 against each other by religious hatred. 
 
 In the Brahma- (/ala-sutta, i.e. the net of Brahma, in 
 which all philosophical theories are supposed to have been 
 caught like so many fishes, we can discover the faint traces 
 of some of the schools of philosophy which we shall have 
 to examine hereafter. Buddha mentions no less than sixty- 
 two of them, with many subdivisions, and claims to be 
 acquainted with every one of them, though standing him- 
 self above them all. 
 
 There are some Samanas and Br&hmans, we are told 1 , 
 who are eternalists, and who proclaim that both the soul 
 and the world are eternal 2 . They profess to^be able to 
 remember an endless succession of former births, including 
 their names, their lineage, and their former dwelling-places. 
 The soul, they declare, is eternal, and the world, giving 
 birth to nothing new, is steadfast as a mountain peak. 
 Living creatures transmigrate, but they are for ever and 
 ever. 
 
 There are some Samanas and Brahmans who are eternal- 
 ists with regard to some things, but not with regard to 
 others. They hold that the soul and the world are partly 
 eternal, and partly not. According to them this world- 
 system will pass away, and there will then be beings reborn 
 in the World of Light (Abhassara), made of mind only, 
 feeding on joy, ' radiating light, traversing the air and 
 continuing in glory for a long time. Here follows a most 
 
 1 Brahma-r/ala-siitta, translated by Rhys Davids, p. 
 8 This would be like the Sasvata-vada. 
 
 2 C 
 
l8 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY, 
 
 peculiar account of how people began to believe in one 
 personal Supreme Being, or in the ordinary God. When 
 the world-system began to re-evolve, tiiere appeared (they 
 say) the palace of Brahm&, but it was empty, Then a 
 certain being fell from the World of Light and came to 
 life in the palace of Brahma. After remaining there in 
 perfect joy for a long period, he became dissatisfied and 
 longed for other beings. And just then other beings fell 
 from the World of 'Light, in all respects like him. But he 
 who had come first b^gan to think that he was Brahm& 
 the Supreme, the Euler, the Lord of all, the Maker and 
 Creator, the Ancient of days, the Father of all. that are and 
 are to be. The other beings he looked upon as created by 
 himself, because as soon as he had wished for them, they 
 had come. Nay, these beings themselves also thought that 
 he must be the Supreme Brahma, because he was there 
 first and they came after him, and it was thought that 
 this Brahma must be eternal and remain for ever, while 
 those who came after him were impermanent, mutable, and 
 limited in duration of life. 
 
 This Brahma reminds one of the tsvara of the Samkhya 
 and other philosophies, which as Brahm&, masc., must be 
 distinguished from Brahma, neuter. Then we are told 
 that there are some gods who spend their lives in sexual 
 pleasures and then fall from their divine state, while 
 others who abstain from such indulgences remain stead- 
 fast, immutable, and eternal. Again, that there are certain 
 gods so full of envy that their bodies become feeble and 
 their mind imbecile. These fall from their divine state, 
 while others who are free from such failings remain stead- 
 fast, immutable, and eternal. 
 
 Lastly, some Samana^ and Brahmans are led to the 
 conclusion that eye, ear, nose, tqngtie, and body form an 
 impermanent Self, while heart or mind or consciousness 
 form a permanent Self, and therefore will remain for ever 
 steadfast, immutable, and eternal. 
 
 Next follows another class of speculators who are called 
 Antanantikas, and who set forth the infinity and finiteness 
 of the world. They maintain either that the world is finite 
 or that it is infinite, or that it is infinite in height and 
 
BRAHMA-tfALA-SUTTA. 1 9 
 
 depth but finite in lateral extension, or lastly, that it is 
 neither finite nor infinite. 
 
 The next description of the various theories held by 
 either Samanas or Brahmaiias seems to refer to what is 
 known as the Syadvada, the theory that everything may 
 be or may not be. Those who hold to this are called 
 wriggling eels. They will not admit any difference be- 
 tween good and bad, and they will not commit themselves 
 to saying that there is another world or that there is not, 
 that there is chance in the world or that there is not, that 
 anything has a result or reward or that it has not, that 
 man continues after death or that he does not. 
 
 It \7ould seein. according to some of the Suttas, that 
 Buddha himself was often disinclined to commit himself 
 on some of the great questions of philosophy and religion. 
 He was often in fact an agnostic on points which he con- 
 sidered beyond the grasp of the human mind, and Maha- 
 vira, the founder of Grainism, took the same view, often 
 taking refuge in Agnosticism or the A t qwanavada l . 
 
 Next, there are Samanas and Brahmans who hold that 
 everything, the soul and the world, are accidental and 
 without a cause, because the}^ can remember that formerly 
 they were not and now they are, or because they prove by 
 means of logic that the soul and the whole world arose 
 without a cause. 
 
 Furthermore, there are Sarnanas and Brahmans who 
 hold and defend the doctrine of a conscious existence after 
 death, but they differ on several points regarding this 
 conscious existence. 
 
 Some maintain that the conscious soul after death has 
 form, others that it has no form, others again that it has 
 and has not, and others that it neither has nor has not' 
 form. Some say it is finite, others that it is infinite, that 
 it is both and that it is neither. Some say that it has one 
 mode of consciousness, others that it has various modes of 
 consciousness, others that it has limited, others that it has 
 unlimited consciousness. Lastly, it is held that the soul 
 after death is happy, is miserable, is both or is neither. 
 
 1 M. M., Natural Religion, p. 105, 
 
 c a 
 
20 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 There are, however, others who say that the soul after 
 death is unconscious, and while in that state has either 
 form, or no form, has and has not, or neither has nor has 
 not form ; that it is finite, infinite, both or neither. 
 
 Again, there are some Samanas and Brahmans who teach 
 the entire annihilation of all living beings. Their argu- 
 ments are various, and have in their general outlines been 
 traced back to some of the teachers of Buddha, such as 
 Alara Kalama, Uddalaka and others J . They uphold the 
 doctrine of happiness in this life, and maintain that com- 
 plete salvation is possible here on earth. Thus when the 
 soul is in perfect enjoyment of the five pleasures of the 
 senses, ~they call that the highest Nirvana. Against this 
 view, however, it is said that sensuous delights are tran- 
 sitory and always involve pain, and that therefore the 
 highest Nirvana consists in putting away all sensuous 
 delights and entering into the first GMna,' i. e. Dhyana, 
 that is, a state of joy born of seclusion and followed by 
 reflection and meditation. Against this view, again, it is 
 asserted that such happiness involves reasoning, and is 
 therefore gross, while the highest Nirvana can only arise 
 when all reasoning has been' conquered and the soul has 
 entered the second (Mana, a state of joy, born of serenity 
 without reasoning, a state of elevation arid internal calm. 
 But even this does not satisfy the true Buddhist, because 
 any sense of joy must be gross, and true Nirvana can only 
 consist in total absence of all longing after joy and thus 
 entering into the third CrMna, serene and thoughtful. 
 Lastly, even this is outbidden. The very dwelling of the 
 mind on care and joy is declared to be gross, and the final 
 Nirvana is said to be reached in the fourth C?Mna only, 
 a state of self-possession and complete equanimity. 
 
 This abstract may give an idea of the variety of philo- 
 sophical opinions which were held in India at or even before 
 the time of Buddha. The Brahma-^ala-sutta professes that 
 all speculations about the past and the future aro included 
 in this Sutta of the net of Brahma. By division and sub- 
 division there are said to be sixty-two theories, arranged 
 
 1 Rhys Davids, 1 c., p. 48. 
 
MAHABH ARATA. 2 1 
 
 into two classes so far as they are concerned either with 
 the past or with the future of the soul ; the soul, as it 
 seems, being always taken for granted. 
 
 The extraordinary part is that in the end all these 
 theories, though well known by Buddha, are condemned 
 by him as arising from the deceptive perceptions of the 
 senses, which produce desire, attachment, and th6refore, 
 reproduction, existence, birth, disease, death, sorrow, weep- 
 ing, pain, grief, and misery, while Buddha alone is able 
 to cut off the root of all error and all misery, and to impart 
 the truth that leads to true Nirvana. 
 
 It does not seem, indeed, as if the philosophical teaching 
 of Buddha himself was so very different at first from that 
 of other schools which had flourished before and' during 
 his lifetime in India ; nay, we can often perceive clear 
 traces of a distant relationship between Buddhism and the 
 six orthodox systems of philosophy. Like streams, all 
 springing from the same summit, they run on irrigating 
 the same expanse of country without proving in the least 
 that one channel of thought was derived from another, as 
 has been so often supposed in the case particularly of 
 Buddhism in its relation to the Samkhya philosophy, 
 as known to* us from the Karikas and Sutras. 
 
 Though the Brahma-grala-sutta does not enter into full 
 details, which may be gathered from other Suttas, it shows 
 at all events how large a number of philosophical schools 
 was in existence then, and how they differed from each 
 other on some very essential points. 
 
 Mah&bh&rata. 
 
 If now we compare one of the numerous passages in, the 
 Mahabharata, containing descriptions of the philosophical 
 sects then flourishing in India, we shall be struck by the 
 great, almost verbal, similarity between their statements 
 and those which we have just read in the Buddhist 
 Brahma-gala-sutta. Thus we read in the Anugita, chap. 
 XXIV : ' We observe th& various forms of piety to be 
 as it were contradictory. Some say piety remains after 
 the body is destroyed ; -some say that it is not so. Some say 
 everything is doubtful ; and others that there is no doubt. 
 
22 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Some say the permanent principle is impermanent and 
 others, too, that it exists, and others that it exists and 
 does not exist. Some say it is of one form or twofold, 
 and others that it is mixed. Some Brhma%as, too, who 
 know Brahman and perceive the truth, believe that it is 
 one ; others that it is distinct ; and others again that it 
 is manifold. Some say both time and space exist, and 
 others that it is not so. Some have matted hair and skins ; 
 and some are clean-shaven and without any covering/ 
 This last can only refer to the followers of Buddha, what 
 ever the ds^te of our Mahabharata may be. * Some people 
 are for bathing ; some for the omission of bathing. Some 
 are for taking food; others are intent on fasting. .Some 
 people extol actions, and others tranquillity. Some extol 
 final emancipation and various kinds of enjoyments ; some 
 wish for riches, and others for indigence/ 
 
 The commentator NilakantfAa refers all these remarks 
 to certain sects known to us from other sources. ' Some 
 hold/ he says, ' that the Self exists after the body is lost ; 
 others, that is, the Lokayatas or Jf&rvakas, hold 'the con- 
 trary. Everything is doubtful, is the view of the Satya- 
 vadins (Sy&dvadins ?) ; nothing is doubtful, that of the 
 Tairthikas, the great teachers. Everything is impermanent, 
 thus say the Tarkikas ; it is permanent, say the Mimamsa- 
 kas; nothing exists, say the $unyavadins ; something 
 exists, but only momentarily, say the Saugatas or Buddhists. 
 Knowledge is one, but the ego and non-ego are two dif- 
 ferent principles, thus say the YogaHras ; they are mixed, 
 say the Uduiomas ; they are one, such is the view of the 
 worshippers of the Brahman as possessed of qualities ; they 
 are. distinct, say other Mimamsakas, who hold that special 
 acts are the cause (of everything) ; manifdkl they are, say 
 the atom is ts ; time and space they are, say the astrologers. 
 Those who say that it is not so, that is to say, that what we 
 see has no real existence at all, are the ancient philosophers ; 
 omission to bathe l is the rule of the NaishtfAika Brahrna- 
 /dirms ; bathing that of the householders/ 
 
 1 Does not this refer to' the solemn bathing which is the first step 
 towards the stage of a Grihastha or independent householder? 
 
BUDDHA. 23 
 
 Thus both rom Buddhistic and Brahmanic sources we 
 learn the same fact the existence of a large number of re- 
 ligious and philosophical sects in the ancient days of 
 India. 
 
 Buddha. 
 
 Out of the midst of this whirlpool of philosophical 
 opinions there rises the form of Buddha, calling for a 
 hearing, at first, not as the herald of any brand new philo- 
 sophy, which he lias to teach, but rather as preaching 
 a new gospel to the poor. I cannot help thinking that 
 it was Buddha's marked personality, far more than his 
 doctrine, that gave him the great influence on his con- 
 temporaries and on so many generations after his death. 
 
 Whether he existed or not. such as he -is described to 
 us in the Suttas, there must have been some one, not 
 a mere name, but a real power in the history of India, 
 a man who made a new epoch in the growth of Indian 
 philosophy, and still more of Indian religion and ethics. 
 His teaching must have acted like a weir across a swollen 
 river. And no wonder, if we consider that Buddha was 
 a prince or nobleman who gave up whatever there was 
 of outward splendour pertaining to his rank. He need 
 not have been a powerful prince, as some have imagined, 
 but he belonged to the royal dass, and it does not appear 
 that he and his house had any suzerain over them. Like 
 several of the philosophers in the Upanishads, he was 
 a Kshatriya, and the very fact of his making himself a 
 popular teacher and religious reformer attracted attention 
 as a social anomaly in the eyes of the people. We see in 
 fact that one of the principal accusations brought against 
 him, at a later time, was that he had arrogated to himself the 
 privilege of being a teacher, a privilege that had always 
 been recognised as belonging to those only who were 
 Brahmans by birth. And as these Brahinans had always 
 been not only the teachers of the people, but likewise the 
 counsellors of princes, we find Buddha also not only 
 patronised, but consulted by the kings of his own time. 
 Curiously enough one of these kings has the name 
 of A^atatatru, a name well known to us from the 
 
24 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Upanishads. He, the son of Vaidehi, a Videha princess, 
 sends two of his ministers, who were Brahmans by birth, 
 to Buddha in order to consult him on what he ought to 
 do. It has been supposed by some scholars that this is the 
 same Ac/atasatru, king of Kaa (or Benares), who, as we 
 saw in the Upanishads, silenced the Brahman Balaki 
 (Kaush. Up. IV, 2, i). But, according to others, A</ata- 
 satru, i. e. ' without an enemy/ should be taken, like Deva- 
 nam priya, as a general title of royalty, not as a proper 
 name l . However that may be, the coincidence is certainly 
 striking, and requires further explanation. At all events, 
 we see that, as in the Upanishads, so in the Tripitfaka also, 
 kings appear as friends and patrons of a philosopheT, such 
 as Buddha, long before he had become recognised as the 
 founder of a new religion, that they take a prominent part 
 in public assemblies, convened for discussing the great pro- 
 blems of religion and philosophy, or afterwards for settling 
 the canon of their religious texts. The best known are 
 Bimbisara, king of Magadha, and Prasenagit, king of Ko&ala. 
 There is in this respect a clear continuity between the 
 Upanishads and the earliest appearance of Buddhism ; and 
 if some of the tenets and technical terms of the Buddhists 
 also are the same as those of the Hindu schools of philo- 
 sophy, there would be as little difficulty in accounting for 
 this as for the continuity between Sanskrit and Pali, The 
 Buddhist monk was clearly prefigured in the Parivraf/aka 
 or itinerant mendicant of the Upanishads (Bnh. Ill, 5). 
 , The name of Buddha, as the awakened and enlightened, 
 ^ould hardly be understood without the previous employ- 
 ment of the root Budh in the Veda ; nor Bhikshu, beggar, 
 without Bhiksh, to beg in the Upanishads. Nirvana, it is 
 true, occurs in later Upanishads only, but if this shows that 
 they are post- Buddhistic, it suggests at the same time that the 
 old Upanishads must have been pre- Buddhistic. Para gati, 
 the highest goal, is taken from the dictionary of the Upani- 
 shads, and possibly Ifakrapravartana, the turning of the 
 wheel 2 , also is taken from the same source. 
 
 4 S. B. E., XI, p. i, note. 
 
 2 Cf. Anugita, chiip. XVII : * You are the one person to turn this wheel, 
 the nave of which is the Brahman, the spoke the understanding, and 
 
BUDDHA. 25 
 
 But though Buddhism and the Upanishads share many 
 things in common which point back to the same distant 
 antiquity, Buddhism in its practical working produced 
 a complete social revolution in India. Though it did not 
 abolish caste, as has sometimes been supposed, it led to 
 a mixture of classes which had formerly been kept more 
 carefully distinct. Anybody, without reference to his birth, 
 could join the Buddhist fraternity, if only he was of good 
 report and free from certain civil disabilities. He could 
 *.hen become an itinerant (Parivra(/aka) friar, without any of 
 that previous discipline which was required from a Brahman. 
 Once a member of the Samgha, he was free from all family 
 ties and allowed to support himself by charitable gifts 
 (Bhiksna). Though kings and noblemen who had embraced 
 the doctrines of Buddha were not obliged to become actual 
 mendicants and join the fraternity, they could become 
 patrons and lay sympathisers (Upasakas), as we see in the 
 case of the kings already mentioned, and of wealthy persons 
 such as Anathapi?icKka. Whenever the Buddhist friars 
 appeared in villages or towns, they seem to have been 
 received with splendid hospitality, and the arrival of 
 Buddha himself with his six hundred or more disciples 
 was generally made the occasion of great rejoicings, in- 
 cluding a public sermon, a public discussion, and other 
 entertainments of a less spiritual character. 
 
 In fact, if we may judge from the Tripitfaka, the whole 
 of India at the time of Buddha would seem once more 
 to have been absorbed in religion and philosophy ; nay, the 
 old saying that the Indians are a nation of philosophers 
 would seem to have never been so true as at the time 
 of the great Buddhist Councils, held, we are told, at B%a- 
 grjha, at Vaisali, and later on at the new residence of 
 Asoka, Patfaliputra. 
 
 This Asoka, like Cranaka of old, took the warmest interest 
 in the proceedings of that Council. It is perhaps too much 
 to say that he made Buddhism the state-religion of India. 
 There never was such a thing as a state-religion in India. 
 Aboka certainly extended his patronage, formerly confined 
 
 which does not turn back, and which is checked by the quality of 
 goodness as its circumference.' 
 
26 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 to Brahmans only, to the new brotherhood founded by 
 Buddha, but there was nothing in India corresponding to 
 a Defender of the Faith. 
 
 It might be objected, no doubt, that the authorities on 
 which we have to rely for a description of the intellectual 
 state of India at the time of these Councils, even that of 
 Asoka, 242 B. c., are one-sided and exaggerated ; but when 
 we consult the Mahabharata which, in its earlier elements, 
 at all events, may be assigned to the same Buddhistic 
 period, we get just the same picture. We meet among 
 the Brahmans as among the Buddhists with an immense 
 variety of philosophical and religious thought, represented 
 by schools and sects striving against each other, ,not yet 
 by persecution, but by serious argumentation. 
 
 Greek Accounts. 
 
 Nor are the scant accounts which the Greeks have left 
 us of what they saw during and after the invasion of 
 India by Alexander the Great at variance with what we 
 learn from these native authorities. Nothing struck the 
 Greeks so much as the philosophical spirit which seemed 
 to pervade that mysterious country. When Megasthenes *, 
 the ambassador of Seleucus Nicator at the court of A'and- 
 ragupta (Sandrocottus), describes what he saw in India 
 in the third century B.C., he speaks of gymnosophists living 
 on mountains or in the plains, having their abode in groves 
 in front of cities within moderate-sized enclosures. * They 
 live/ he writes, ' in a simple style, and lie on beds of rushes 
 or skins. They abstain from animal food and sexual 
 pleasures, and spend their time in listening to serious 
 discourse and in imparting their knowledge to such as will 
 listen to them.' The so-called /S'armanas mentioned by 
 Megasthenes, have generally been accepted as representing 
 the $ramaftas or Samanas, the members of the Buddhist 
 brotherhood who then seemed to have lived most amicably 
 with the Brahmans. Nothing at least is said of any 
 personal enmity between them, however much they may 
 have differed in their philosophical and religious opinions. 
 
 1 Ancient India, by J. W. M c Crindle, 1877, p. 97seq.. 
 
GREEK ACCOUNTS. 27 
 
 His H v lobioi or forest-dwellers are probably meant for the 
 Brahrnanic Vanaprpthas, the members of the third A&rama 
 who had to live in the forest, at a certain distance from 
 their villages, and give themselves up to asceticism and 
 meditation, such as we see described in the Upanishads. 
 Even if their name did not tell us, we are distinctly 
 informed that they lived in the forest, subsisting on leaves 
 and wild fruits, and wore garments made of the bark of 
 trees (Valkala) \ They communicated, we are told, with 
 bings, who, like Cranaka and A-t/atasatru, Prasenac/it and 
 Bimbisara, or in later times King Harsha, consulted them 
 by messengers regarding the causes of things, and who 
 through them worshipped and supplicated their gods. 
 Clement of Alexandria, after repeating all this, adds at the 
 end that there are also philosophers in India who follow 
 the precepts of Butta, whom they honour as a god on 
 account of his extraordinary holiness. This is the first 
 Greek mention of Buddjia, for no one else can have been 
 meant * by Clement. The name was never mentioned by 
 Alexander's companions, though there are early coins, 
 which point to Greek influence, with the figure and name 
 of Boddo. We are also told that these philosophers 
 practised fortitude, both by undergping active toil, and 
 by enduring pain, remaining for whole days motionless in 
 a fixed attitude. 
 
 Buddhist Pilgrims, Hiouen-tlisang-. 
 
 Some centuries later we have another and independent 
 source of information as to the intellectual state of India, 
 and this also is in perfect accordance with what we have 
 hitherto learnt about India as the home of philosophers. 
 Beginning with the fourth century of our era, that is, at 
 the time when what I call the Renaissance of Sanskrit 
 literature and national independence began, Chinese 
 Buddhists, who made their pilgrimages to India as to 
 their Holy Land, described to us the state of the country 
 such as they saw it. Those who came early, such as 
 Fa-hian, saw Buddhism flourishing in the fifth century, 
 
 1 Clement Alex., Strom, i. p. 305, adds that they neither live in cities 
 nor even in houses. 
 
28 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 those who caine later in the sixth and seventh 
 witnessed already the evident signs of 'its decline. The 
 most important among them was Hiouen-thsang who visited 
 India from 629 to 645, and whose travels have been trans- 
 lated by my late friend, Stanislas Julien. No one can 
 doubt 'the trustworthiness of this witness, though he may- 
 have been deceived in some of his observations. He 
 describes the Buddhist monasteries scattered all over the 
 country, the schools of the most illustrious teachers whose 
 lectures' he attended, and their public assemblies, par 
 ticularly those that took place at the court of /Siladitya 
 Harshavardhana 610-650, commonly called Srl-Harsha of 
 Kanyakub^ra. This king, who is described as having con- 
 quered the five Indias, seems to have been in his heart 
 a Buddhist, though he bestowed hik patronage and pro- 
 tection on all sects alike, whether followers of the Vedas or 
 of Buddha. No one, we are told, was allowed to eat flesh 
 in his dominions, and whoever had killed a living thing 
 was himself put to death 1 . He built many hospitals and 
 monasteries, and entertained many Buddhist friars at his 
 own expense. Every year he assembled the $ramawas 
 from different kingdoms, and made them discuss in his 
 presence the most important points of Buddha's doctrine. 
 Each disputant had his chair, and the king himself was 
 present to judge of their learning and their good behaviour. 
 Hiouen-thsang. who by this time had made hirnself & pro- 
 ficient Sanskrit scholar and Buddhist theologian, having 
 studied the Buddhist writings under .some of the most 
 illustrious teachers of the time, was invited by the king to 
 be present at one of these great assemblies, on the southern 
 bank of the Ganges. Twenty kings were gathered there, 
 each bringing with him both /Sramarms and Brahmanas. 
 A large camp was constructed, and every day rich alms 
 were bestowed on the $ramanas. This, as it would seem, 
 excited the anger of some Brahmans who were present. 
 They tried to set fire to the camp and the magnificent 
 buildings erected by the king. And when they failed in 
 this, they actually hired an assassin to kill the monarch. 
 
 1 Memoires ur les Contr6e Occidentals, Juliea, i. p. 251 seq. 
 
CHINESE ACCOUNTS. 2Q 
 
 The k ; ng, however, escaped, and forgave the would-be 
 assassin, but exiled a large number of Brahmans from his 
 kingdom. This gives us the first idea of what at that time 
 religious persecution meant on the part of Buddhists as well 
 as of Brahmans. These persecutions may have been 
 exaggerated, but they cannot be altogether denied. Hiouen- 
 thsang himself seems to have taken an active part in this 
 Congress of Religion, and I still believe it was he who is 
 mentioned by his Sanskrit name as * Mokshadeva ' or as 
 the ' Master of the TripUaka.' After making all reasonable 
 deductions, such as we should make in the case of the 
 descriptions of any enthusiastic witness, enough seems to 
 me to remain to show that from the time of the Upanishads 
 to the time of Hiouen-thsang's sojourn in India, one domi- 
 nant interest pervaded the whole country, the interest in 
 the great problems of humanity here on earth. While 
 in other countries the people at large cared more for their 
 national heroes, as celebrated in their epic poetry on 
 account of their acts of bravery or cunning, India under 
 the sway of its Vedic poets, most of them of a priestly 
 rather than a warrior origin, remained true to its character. 
 Its kings surrounded themselves with a court of sages 
 rather than of warriors, and the people at large developed 
 and strengthened their old taste for religious and philo- 
 sophical problems that has endured for centuries, and is 
 not extinct even at the present day. Of course, if we call 
 the people of India a nation of philosophers, this is not 
 meant to deny that the warrior class also had their popular 
 heroes, and that their achievements also excited the interest 
 of the people. India is large enough for many phases of 
 thought. We must not forget that even in the Vedic 
 hymns Indra, the most popular of thoir gods, was a warrior. 
 The two great epic poems are there to testify that hero- 
 worship is innate in the human heart, and that in early 
 days men and even women placed muscle higher than 
 brain. But many even of these epic heroes have a tinge of 
 philosophical sadness about them, and Argruna, the greatest 
 among them, is at the same time the recipient of the 
 highest wisdom communicated to him by Krish?ia, as 
 described in the Bhagavad-gita. 
 
30 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Krish?*a himself, the hero of the Bhagavad-gita, was of 
 Kshatriya origin, and was looked upon as the very incar- 
 nation of the Deity. It is curious that the Sanskrit 
 language has no word for epic poetry. Itihasa refers to 
 the matter rather than to the poetical form of what we 
 should call epic poems, and the Hindus, strange to say,, 
 speak of their Mahabharata as a Law-book, Dharma- 
 xAstra *, and to a certain extent it may have fulfilled that 
 purpose. 
 
 Xing' Harsha, 
 
 If the account given by Hiouen-thsang of the spiritual 
 state of India at the time of his visit and of his stay at the 
 court of Harsha should seem to be tinged too much by the 
 sentiments of the Buddhist priest, we have only to con- 
 sult the history of Harsha as written in Sanskrit by Barm, 
 to feel convinced of the faithfulness of his account. No 
 doubt Hiouen-thsang looked at India with the eyes of 
 a follower of Buddha, but Ba??a also, though not a 
 Buddhist, represents to us the different schools and 
 teachers, whether followers of Buddha or of the Veda, as 
 living together apparently in perfect peace, and obeying 
 the orders of the same king. They would naturally discuss 
 their differences and exchange opinions on points on which 
 they were agreed or opposed to each other, but of violent 
 persecutions by one side or the other, or of excommunica- 
 tions and massacres, we hear very little or nothing The 
 king himself, the friend and patron of Hiouen-thsang, 
 tolerated both Buddhism and Brahmanism in his realm, 
 and we feel doubtful sometimes which of the two he 
 favoured most in his own mind. We see him, for instance, 
 pay his respects to a sage of the name of Divakara, who 
 had been by birth and education a Brahman, but had been 
 converted to Buddha's doctrine, without, as it would seem, 
 incurring thereby the displeasure of the king or of his 
 friends. In the Harsha-/ arita 2 the king is represented 
 to us as entering a large forest, surrounded by his retinue. 
 
 1 See Diihlmaim, Das MahubMrata. 
 
 a Harsha- frarita, translated by Cowell and Thomas, p. 235. 
 
KING HABSHA. 31 
 
 When approaching the abode of the sage, the king leaves 
 his suite behind and proceeds on foot, attended by only 
 a few of his vassal^. While still at a distance from the 
 holy man's abode, the king perceived a large number of 
 'Buddhists from various provinces, perched on pillows, 
 seated on rocks, dwelling in bowers of creepers, lying in 
 thickets or in the shadow of branches, or squatting on the 
 roots of trees, devotees dead to all passions, (rainas in 
 white robes (/Svet&mbaras), with mendicants (Bhikshus or 
 Parivragrakas), followers of Krishna (Bhagavatas), religious 
 students (Brahmafcarins), ascetics who pulled out their hair, 
 followers of Kapila fSamkhyas), Rainas, Lokayatikas 
 (atheists), followers of Ka-nada (Vai^eshikas), followers of 
 the Upanishads (Vedantins), believers in God as a creator 
 (Naiyayikas), assayers of metals (?), students of legal 
 institutes, students of the Pura?ias, adepts in sacrifices 
 requiring seven priests, adepts in grammar, followers of 
 the Paw&aratras, and others beside, all diligently following 
 their own tenets, pondering, urging objections, raising 
 doubts, resolving them, giving etymologies, and disputing, 
 discussing, and explaining moot points of doctrine,' and all 
 this, it would seem, in perfect peace and harmony. 
 
 Now I ask once more, is there any other country in the 
 world of which a similar account could be given, always 
 the same from century to century ? Such a life as here 
 described may seem very strange to us, nay, even incredi- 
 ble, but that is our fault, because we forget the totally 
 different conditions of intellectual life in India and else- 
 where. We cannot dissociate intellectual life from cities, 
 from palaces, schools, universities, museums, and all the 
 rest. However* the real life of India was not lived in 
 towns, but in villages and forests. Even at present it 
 should be remembered that towns are the exception in 
 India, and that the vast majority of people live in the 
 country, in villages, and their adjoining groves. Here the 
 old sages were free to meditate on the problems of life and 
 on all that is nearest to the heart of man. If they were 
 not philosophers, let them be called dreamers, but dreamers 
 of dreams without which life would hardly be worth 
 living. 
 
32 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 An insight into this state of things seemed J>o me 
 necessary as a preliminary to a study of Indian philosophy 
 as being throughout the work of the people rather than 
 that of a few gifted individuals. As far back as we can 
 trace the history of thought in India, from the time of 
 King Harsha and the Buddhist pilgrims back to the 
 descriptions found in the Mahabharata, the testimonies 
 of the Greek invaders, the minute accounts of the Buddhists 
 in their Tripi^aka, and in the end the Upanishads them- 
 selves, and the hymns of the Veda, weare met everywhere 
 by the same picture, a society in which spiritual interests 
 predominate and throw all material interests into the shade, 
 a world of thinkers, a nation of philosophers, 
 
CHAPTER IL 
 
 The Vedas. 
 
 IP after these preliminary remarks we look for the real 
 beginnings of philosophy on the soil of India, we shall find 
 them in a stratum where philosophy is hardly differentiated 
 as yet from religion, and long before the fatal divorce 
 between religion and philosophy had been finally accom- 
 plished, that is in the Vedas, 
 
 There .have been curious misunderstandings about this 
 newly-discovered relic of ancient literature, if literature 
 it may be called, having nothing whatever to do in its 
 origin with any litera scnpia. No one has ever doubted 
 that in the Veda we have the earliest monument of 
 Aryan language and thought, and, in a certain sense, 
 of Aryan literature which, in an almost miraculous way. 
 has been preserved to us, during the long night of centuries, 
 chiefly by means of oral tradition. But seeing that the 
 Veda was certainly more ancient than anything we possess 
 of Aryan literature elsewhere, people jumped at the con- 
 clusion that it. would bring us near tp the very beginning 
 of all things, and that we should find in the hymns of 
 the Rig-veda the c very songs of the morning stars and the 
 shouts of the sons of God.' When these expectations were 
 disappointed, many of these ancient hymns* turning out 
 tp be very simple, nay sometimes very commonplace, and 
 with little of positive beauty, or novel truth, a reaction 
 set in, as it always does after an excessive enthusiasm. 
 The Vedic hymns were looked on askance, and it was even 
 hinted tha* they might be but forgeries of those very 
 suspicious individuals, the Brahmans or Pandits of India. 
 In the end, however, the historical school has prevailed, 
 and the historian now sees that in the Vedas we have 
 to deal, not with what European philosophers thought 
 3 D 
 
34 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 ought to have been, but with what is and has be^n ; not 
 with what is beautiful, but with what is true and his- 
 torically real. If the Vedic hymns are simple, natural, 
 and often commonplace, they teach us that very useful 
 lesson that the earliest religious aspirations of the Aryan 
 conquerors of India were simple and natural, and often, 
 from our point of view, very commonplace. This too is 
 a lesson worth learning. Whatever the Yedas may be 
 called, they are to us unique and^ priceless guides in 
 opening before our eyes tombs of thought richer in relics 
 than the royal tomos of Egypt, and more ancient and 
 primitive in thought than the oldest hymns of Babylonian 
 or Accadian poets. If we grant that they belonged to the 
 second millennium before our era, we are probably on safe 
 ground, though we should not forget that this is a con- 
 structive date only, and that such a date does not become 
 positive by mere repetition. It may be very brave to postu- 
 late 2000 B.C. or even 500.0 B.C. as a minimum date for the 
 Vedic hymns, but what is gained by such bravery? Such 
 assertions are safe so far as they cannot be refuted, but 
 neither can they be proved, considering that we have no 
 contemporaneous dates to attach them to. And when 
 I say that the Vedic hymns are more ancient and primitive 
 than the oldest Babylonian and Accadian hymns, all that 
 I mean and could mean is that they contain fewer traces 
 of an advanced civilisation than the hymns deciphered 
 from cuneiform tablets, in. which we find mention of such 
 things as temples in stone and idols of gold, of altars, 
 sceptres and crowns, cities and libraries, and public squares. 
 There are thoughts in those ancient Mesopotamian hymns 
 which would have staggered the poets of the Veda, such as 
 their chief god being called the king of blessedness, the 
 light of mankind, &c. We should look in vain in the Veda 
 for such advanced ideas as * the holy writing of the mouth 
 of the deep/ ' the god of the pure incantation/ ' thy will 
 is made known in heaven and the angels bow their faces/ 
 ' I fill my hand with a mountain of diamonds, of turquoises 
 and of crystal/ ' thou art as strong bronze/ ' of bronze and 
 lead thou art the mingler/ or ' the wide heaven is the 
 habitation of thy liver/ All this may be very old as far 
 
PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF VEDIC GODS. 35 
 
 as the progression of the equinoxes is concerned, but mthe 
 progress of human thought these ideas mark a point, not 
 yet reached by the poets of the Veda. In that sense, 
 whatever their age, these Babylonian hymns are more 
 modern in thought than the very latest hymns of the 
 Rig-veda, though I confess that it is that very fact, 
 the advanced civilisation at that early time which they 
 reflect, that makes the Babylonian hymns so interesting 
 in the eyes of the historian. I do not speak here of 
 philosophical ideas, for we have learnt by this time that 
 they are of no age and of any age. 
 
 Whatever may be the date of the Vedic hymns, whether 
 1500 or 15000 B.C., they have their own unique place and 
 stand by themselves in the literature of the world. They 
 tell us something of the early growth of the human mind 
 of which we find no trace anywhere else. Whatever 
 aesthetic judgements may be pronounced on them, and 
 there is certainly little of poetical beauty in them, in 
 the eyes of the historian and the psychologist they will 
 always retain their peculiar, value, far superior to the 
 oldest chronicles, far superior to the most ancient inscrip- 
 tions, for every verse, nay every word in them, is an 
 authentic document in the history of the greatest empire, 
 the empire of the human mind, as established in India 
 in the second millennium B.C. 
 
 The Philosophical Basis of the Vedic Gods. 
 
 Let us begin with the simplest beginnings. What can 
 be simpler than the simple conviction that the regularly 
 recurring events of nature require certain agents? Animated 
 by this conviction the Vedic poets spoke not only of rain 
 (Indu), but of a rainer (Indra), not only of fire and light 
 as a fact, but of a lighter and burner, an agent of fire and 
 light, a Dyaus (Zetk) and an Agni (ignis). It seemed 
 impossible to them that sun and moon should rise every 
 day, should grow strong and weak again every month 
 or every year, unless there was an agent behind who 
 controlled them. We may smile at such thoughts, but 
 they were natural thoughts, nor would it be easy even 
 now to prove a negative to this view of the world. One 
 
36 , INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 of these agents they called Savitar (*ue'r??/o, or foVos), the 
 enlivener, as distinguished yet inseparable from Surya, 
 the heavenly, the sun, Greek Helios. Soma, from the 
 same root Su, was likewise at first what enlivens, i.e. the 
 rain, then the moon which was supposed to send dew and 
 rain, and lastly the enlivening draught, used for sacrificial 
 purposes and prepared from a plant called Soma or the 
 enlivener, a plant known to Brahmans and Zoroastrians 
 before the separation of the two. Tn this way both the 
 religion and the mythology of the Vedic sages have a philo- 
 sophical basis, and deserve our attention, if we wish to 
 understand the beginnings not only of Indian mythology 
 and religion, but of Indian philosophy also. ' No, one,' as 
 Deussen truly says, ' can or should in future talk about 
 these things who does not know the Kig-vedaV The 
 process on which originally all gods depended for their 
 very existence, the personification of, or the activity attri- 
 buted to the great natural phenomena, while more or less 
 obscured in all other religions, takes place in the Rig-veda 
 as it were in the full light of day. The gods of the Vedic, 
 and indirectly of all the Aryan people, were the agents 
 postulated behind the great phenomena of nature. This 
 was the beginning of philosophy, the first application 
 of the law of causality, and in it we have to recognise 
 the only true solution of Indo-European mythology, and 
 likewise of Aryan philosophy. Whatever may have 
 existed before these gods, we can only guess at, we cannot 
 watch it with our own eyes, while the creation of Dyaus, 
 light and sky, of Prithivi, earth, of Varuna, dark sky, 
 of Agni, fire, and other such Vedic deities, requires neither 
 hypothesis nor induction. There was the sky, Dyaus, 
 apparently active, hence there must be an agent called 
 Dyaus. To say that this Aryan Theogony was preceded 
 by a period of fetishism or totemism, is simply gratuitous. 
 At all events, it need not be refuted before it has been 
 proved. Possibly the naming of the sky as an agent and 
 as a masculine noun came first, that of the mere objective 
 sky, as a feminine, second. 
 
 1 Deussen, Allgemeine Geschichte der Philosophie, p. 83. 
 
THREE CLASSES OF VEDIC GODS. 37 
 
 Three Classes of Vedic Gods. 
 
 We know now by what very simple process the Vedic 
 Aryas satisfied their earliest craving for causes, how they 
 created their gods, and divided the whole drama of nature 
 into three acts and the actors into three classes, those of the 
 sky, those of mid-air, and those of the earth. To the first 
 belong Dyaus, the agent of the sky ; Mitra, the agent of the 
 bright sky and day; Varuna, the agent of the dark sky 
 and evening; Surya, the agent of the sun; Savit?'i, the 
 agent of the enlivening or morning sun ; Asvinaii, the twin 
 agents of morning and evening ; Ushas, the maiden of the 
 daWri. 
 
 To mid-air belong Indra, the agent of the atmosphere in 
 its change between light and darkness, the giver of rain ; 
 the Marutas, the agents of the storm-clouds; Vayu and 
 Vata, the agents of the air ; Pan/anya, the agent of the rain- 
 cloud ; Rudra, the agent of storm and lightning) and several 
 others connected with meteoric phenomena. 
 
 To the earth belong Prithivi herself, the earth as active ; 
 Agni, the agent of fire ; Saras vati and other rivers ; some- 
 times the Dawn also, as rising from the earth as well as 
 from the sky. These gods were the first philosophy, the 
 first attempt at explaining the wonders of nature. It is 
 curious to observe the absence of anything like star- wor- 
 ship in India among the Aryan nations in general. A few 
 of the stars only, such as were connected with human 
 affairs, determining certain seasons, and marking the time 
 of rain (Hyades), the return of calmer weather (Pleiades), 
 or the time for mowing (Kr^ttikas), were noticed and 
 named, but they never rose to the rank of the high gods. 
 They were less interesting to the dwellers in India, because 
 they did not exercise the. same influence on their daily life 
 as they do in Europe. There was of course no settled 
 system in this pantheon, the same phenomena being often 
 represented by different agents, and different phenomena 
 by the same agents. The gods, however, had evidently 
 been known before they were distributed into three classes, 
 as gods of the sky, of the earth, and of the clouds t . 
 
 1 M. M., Contributions to the Science of Mythology, p. 475. 
 
38 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Other Classifications of Cfods. 
 
 If we call this creation and likewise classification of the 
 Devas or gods, the first philosophy of the human race, we 
 can clearly see that it was not artificial or the work of one 
 individual only, but was suggested by nature herself. Earth, 
 air, and sky, or again, morning, noon, and night, spring, 
 summer, and winter, are triads clearly visible in nature, and 
 therefore, under different names and forms, mirrored in 
 ancient mythology in every part of the world. These triads 
 are very different from the later number assigned to the 
 gods. Though the Devas are known in the Rig-veda and 
 the A vesta as thirty- three, I doubt whether there is any 
 physical necessity for this number *. It seems rather due 
 to a taste very common among uncivilised tribes of playing 
 with numbers and multiplying them to any extent 2 . We 
 see the difficulty experienced by the Brahmans themselves 
 when they had to fill the number of thirty-three and give 
 their names. Sometimes they are called three times eleven; 
 but when we ask who these three times eleven are, we find 
 no real tradition, but only more or less systematising theories. 
 We are told that they were the gods in the sky, on earth, 
 and in the clouds (1, 139, 1 1), or again that they were Vasus, 
 Rudras, Adityas, Visve Devas, and Maruts 3 , but the number 
 of each of these classes of gods seems to have been originally 
 seven rather than eleven. Even this number of seven is 
 taken by some scholars in the general sense of many, like 
 devanam bhftyish^AaA ; but it is at all events recognised in 
 the Rig-veda VIII, a#, 5, though possibly in a late verse. 
 What we look for in- vain in the Veda are the names of 
 seven Maruts or seven Rudras. We can perhaps make out 
 seven Vasus, if, as we are told,, they are meant for Agni, 
 the Adityas, the Marutas, Indra, Ushas, the Asvins and 
 Rudra. The seven Adityas, too, may. possibly be counted 
 as Varuwa, Mitra, Aryaman, Bh t aga, Daksha. Am^a, and 
 Tvashtri, but all this is very uncertain. We see in fact the 
 three times eleven replaced by the eight Vasus, -the eleven 
 
 1 Satap. Br. XII, 6, i, p. 205. 
 
 8 Contributions, p. 475. 
 
 1 Ved&nta- Sutras I, 3, 28 ; and Rig- Veda X, 125, i. 
 
THE VISVE OR ALL-GODS. 39 
 
 Marut? and the. twelve Adityas, to which two other gods 
 are added as leaders, to bring their number up to the 
 required thirty-three. 
 
 In still later times the number of the Adityas, having 
 been taken for the solar light in each successive month, 
 was raised to twelve. I look upon all these attempts at 
 a classification of the Vedic gods as due once more to the 
 working of a philosophical or systematismg spirit. It is 
 not so much the exact number or names of these gods, as 
 the fact that attempts had been made at so early a time 
 to comprehend certain gods under the same name, that 
 interests the philosophical observer. 
 
 The Visve or All-gods. 
 
 The first step in this direction seems to be represented 
 by the Visve or the Visve Devas. Visva is different from 
 Sarva, all. It means the .gods together, Gesammtgotter 
 (curicti), not simply all the gods (omnes). Sometimes, there- 
 fore, the two words can be used together, as Taitt. Br. Ill, 
 i, i, Vfsv& bhuvanani sarva, 'all beings together/ The 
 Maruts are called Visve MarutaA, in the sense of all the 
 Maruts together. These Visve, though they belong to the 
 class-gods (Ga?ias), are different from other class-gods inas- 
 much as their number is hardly fixed. It would be endless 
 to give the names 'of all the gods who are praised in the 
 hymns addressed to the Visve Devas. Indra often stands 
 at their head (Indraryyesh^a/*), but there is hardly one of 
 the Vedic gods who does not at times appear as one of them. 
 What is really important in these Visve is that they repre- 
 sent the first attempt at comprehending the various gods 
 as forming a class, so that even the other classes (Ga?ias), 
 such as Adityas, Vasus, or Rudras may be comprehended 
 under the wider concept of Visve. It is all the more curious 
 that this important class, important not only for mytho- 
 logical but for philosophical and religious purposes also, 
 should have attracted so little attention hitherto. They 
 are passed over, as a class, even in that rich treasure-house 
 of Vedic Mythology, the fifth volume of Muir's Original 
 Sanskrit Texts, but they ought not to be ignored by those 
 who are interested in the progress of the ancient rnytho- 
 
4O INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 logical religions from given multiplicity to postulated unity, 
 as an essential character of the godhead. 
 
 Tendencies towards Unity among- the Ctodg. 
 
 But while this conception of Visve Devas marks the 
 first important approach from the many incoherent gods 
 scattered through nature to a gradually more and more 
 monotheistic phase of thought in the Veda, other move- 
 ments also tended in the same direction. Several gods, 
 owing to their position in nature, were seen to perform the 
 same acts, and hence a poet might well take upon\ himself 
 to say that Agni not only acted with Indra or Savitri, 
 but that in certain of his duties Agni was Indra and was 
 SavitH. Hence arose a number of dual gods, such as Indra- 
 Agni, Mitra-Varuwau, Agni-Shomau. also the two Asvins. 
 On other occasions three gods were praised as working 
 together, such as Aryaman, Mitra and Varuna, or Agni, 
 Soma and Gandharva, while from another point of view, 
 Vishnu with his three strides represented originally the 
 same heavenly being, as rising in the morning, culminating 
 at noon, and setting in the evening. Another god or god- 
 dess, Aditi, was identified with the sky and the air, was 
 called mother, father, and son, was called all the gods and 
 the five races of men, was called the past and the future. 
 Professor Weber has strangely misunderstood me if he 
 imagines that I designated this phase of religious thought 
 as Henotheism. 
 
 Benotheism. 
 
 To identify Indra, Agni, and Varuna is one thing, it is 
 syncretism ; to address either Indra or Agni or Varuria, as 
 for the time being the only god in existence with an entire 
 forgetf ulness of all other gods, is quite another ; and it was 
 this phase, so fully developed in the hymns of the Veda, 
 which I wished to mark definitely by a name of its own, 
 calling it Henotheism l . 
 
 1 This phase of religious thought has been well described in the same 
 fifth volume of Muir's Original Sanskrit Texts, p. 354 ; see also Deussen, 
 Geachichte <Ier Philosophic. I, p. 104. 
 
MONOTHEISM AND MONISM. 4! 
 
 Monotheism and Monism. 
 
 All these tendencies worked together in one direction, 
 and made some of the Vedic poets see more or less distinctly 
 that the idea of God, if once clearly conceived, included 
 the ideas of being one and without an equal. They thus 
 arrived at the conviction that above the great multitude of 
 gods there must be one supreme personality > and, after 
 a time, they declared that there was behind all the gods 
 that one (Tad Ekam) of which the gods were but various 
 names. 
 
 Rv. I, 164, 46. EkaFi sat viprSA bahudha vadanti, Agnim, Yatnam, 
 Matarisv&nam ahuft. 
 
 The bages call that One in many ways, they call .it Agni, Yama, 
 Matarisvan. 
 
 Rv. X^ 129, a. Axiit avatam svadhaya tat ekam, tasmai ha anyat na 
 paraA kim fcana asa. 
 
 That One breathed breathlessly by itself, other than it there nothing 
 since has been. 
 
 The former thought led by itself to a 'monotheistic reli- 
 gion, the latter t as .we shall see t to a monistic philosophy. 
 
 In trying to trace the onward movement of religious and 
 philosophical thought in the Veda, we should recognize 
 once for all the great difficulties with which we have to 
 contend. Speaking as yet of the hymns only, we have in 
 the Kig-veda a collection of 1,017 hymns, each on an 
 average containing about ten verses. But this collection 
 was made at different times and in different places, syste- 
 matically in some respects, but in others, more or less at 
 random. We have no right to suppose that we have even 
 a hundredth part of the religious and popular poetry that 
 existed during the Vedic age. We must therefore carefully 
 guard against such conclusions as that, because we possess 
 in our Rig-veda-samhita but one -hymn addressed to a cer- 
 tain deity, therefore that god was considered as less impor- 
 tant or was less widely worshipped than other gods. This 
 has been a very common mistake, and I confess that there 
 is some excuse for it, just as there was for looking upon 
 Homer as the sole representative of the whole epic poetry 
 of Greece, and upon his mythology as the mythology of 
 the whole of Greece. But we must never forget that the 
 
42 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Rig-veda is but a fragment, and represents the whole of 
 Vedic mythology and religion even lees than Homer repre- 
 sents the whole of Greek mythology and religion. It is 
 wonderful enough that such a collection should have 
 escaped destruction or forgetful ness, when we keep in mind 
 that the ancient literature of India was purely mnemonic, 
 writing being perfectly unknown, but the art of mnemonics 
 being studied all the more as a discipline essential to intel- 
 lectual life. What has come down to us of Vedic hymns, 
 by an almost incredible, yet well attested process, is to us 
 a fragment only, and we must be on our guard not to go 
 beyond the limits assigned to us by the facts of the case. 
 Nor can the hymns which have come down to vs have 
 been composed by one man or by members of one family 
 or one community only ; they reach us in the form of ten 
 collections (Mandalas) composed, we are told, by different 
 men, and very likely at different periods. Though there is 
 great similarity, nay even monotony running through 
 them, there are differences also that cannot fail to strike 
 the attentive reader. In all such matters, however, we 
 must be careful not to go beyond the evidence before us, 
 and abstain as much as possible from attempting to syste- 
 matise and. generalise what comes to us in an unsystematised, 
 nay often chaotic form. 
 
 Pro// A,pati. 
 
 Distinguishing therefore, as much as possible, between 
 what has been called tentative monotheism, which is reli- 
 gion, and tentative monism, which is philosophy, we can 
 aiscover traces of the former in the famous hymn X, 121, 
 which, years ago, I called the hymn to the Unknown God. 
 Here the poet asks in every verse to whom, to what Deva, 
 he should offer his sacrifice, and says towards the end 
 whether it should be, ydh devdshu dhi devaA dkaL asit, 
 * he who alone was goc} above gods/ Many of the ordinary 
 gods are constantly represented as supreme, with an entire 
 torgetfninees that one only can be so; but this is very 
 different from the distinct demand here made by the poet 
 for a god that should be abovy all other gods. It is much 
 niore like the Semitic demand for a god above all gods 
 
VISVAKARMAN. TVASHT7?/. 43 
 
 (Exod, xviii. n), or for a father of gods and men, as in 
 Greece (irar^p avbpvv re Oe&v re). Aristotle already re- 
 marked that, as men have one king, they imagined that 
 the gods also must be governed by one king 1 . I believe, 
 however, that the ground for this lies deeper, and that the 
 idea of oneness is really involved in the idea of God as 
 a supreme and unlimited being. But Aristotle might no 
 doubt have strengthened his argument by .appealing to 
 India where ever sg many clans and tribes had each their 
 own king, whether Ragrah or Maharajah, and where it 
 might seem natural to imagine a number of supreme gods, 
 each with their own limited supremacy. Still all this 
 would have satisfied the monistic craving for a time only. 
 Here too, in the demand for and in the supply of a supreme 
 deity, we can watch a slow and natural progress. At first, 
 for instance, when (Rv. VIII, 89) Indra was to be praised 
 for his marvellous deeds, it was he who had made the sun 
 to shine. He was called $atakratu, the all-powerful and 
 all-wise, or Abhibhu, the conqueror. At the end the poet 
 sums up by saying : Visva-karma vLsva-devaA maMn asi, 
 * thou art the maker of all things, thou art the great 
 Visvadeva (all-god)/ The last word is difficult to translate, 
 but its real purport becomes clear, if we remember what we 
 saw before with reference to the origin of the Visve Devas. 
 
 Visvafcarman. 
 
 In such adjectives as $atakratu, and still .more in Visva- 
 karman, the maker of all things, we see the clear germs 
 that were to grow into the one supreme deity. As soon 
 as Visvakarman was used as a substantive, the Brahmans 
 had what they wanted, they had their All-maker, their god 
 above all gods, the god whose friendship the other gods 
 were eager to secure (VIII, 89, 3). 
 
 Tvasfe/H. 
 
 The maker or creator of all things is the nearest approach 
 to the onjB and only god of later times. It should not be 
 forgotten, however, that, there was already another maker. 
 
 1 Arist. Politics, i, a, 7 ; Muir, 0. S. T., V, p. 5. 
 
44 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 called TvashJ ri, i. e. T&TOH-', only that he did not rise to the 
 position of a real creator of all things. He seems to have 
 been too old, too mythological a character for philosophical 
 purposes. He remained the workman, the Hephaestos, of 
 the Vedic gods, well known as the father of SaraTiyu and 
 Visvarftpa. He had all the requisites for becoming a 
 supreme deity, in fact, he is so here and there, as when 
 he is addressed as having formed heaven and earth (X, no, 
 9), nay, as having begotten everything (visvam bhuvanam 
 (jac/ana). He is in fact all that a Creator can be required 
 to be, being supposed to have created even some of the 
 gods, such as Agni, Indra, and Brahman aspati (Rv. X, 2, 
 7 ; II, 23, 17). If Agni himself is called Tvashtfri (Rv. II, 
 1,5), this is merely in consequence of that syncretism which 
 identified Agni with ever so many gods, but more par- 
 ticularly with Tvashtfri, the shaper of all things. 
 
 When Tvashfrri is called Savitri, this does rfot necessarily 
 imply his identity with the god Savitri, but the word 
 should in that case be taken as a predicate, meaning the en- 
 livener, just as in other places he is praised as the nouri^her 
 or preserver of all creatures, as the sun (Rv. Ill, 55, 19). 
 One of the causes why he did not, like Pragrapati or Visva- 
 karman, become a supreme god and creator was his having 
 belonged to a more ancient pre- Vedic stratum of gods. 
 This might also account for Indra's hostility to TvashZri, 
 considering that he (Indra), as a new god, had himself 
 supplanted the older gods, such as Dyaus.. We must be 
 prepared for many such possibilities, though I give them 
 here as guesses only. It is possible also that the name of 
 Asura, given to Tvashtfri and to his son Visvarupa, points 
 in the same direction, and that we should take it, not in 
 the sense of an evil spirit, but in the sense of an ancient 
 daimon in which it is applied in other hymns to Varu'wa, 
 and other ancient Devas. Tvashr is best known as the 
 father of Saranyft and the grandfather therefore of the 
 Asvins (day and night), but it is a mistake to suppose that 
 as father of Yama and Yami he was ever conceived as the 
 progenitor of the whole human race. Those who so con- 
 fidently identify Yama and Yaml with Adam and Eve 
 seem to have entirely forgotten that Yama never had any 
 
SEARCH FOE A SUPREME DL1TY. 45 
 
 children of Yaini. In his mythological character, Tvashtri 
 is sometimes identical with Dyaus (Zeus) *, but he never 
 becomes, as has sometimes been supposed, a purely abstract 
 deity ; and in this we see the real difference between Tvashtfri 
 and Visvakarman. Visvakarman, originally a mere pre- 
 dicate, has no antecedents, no parents, and no offspring, like 
 Tvashtfri (Rv. X, 81, 4). The work of Visvakarman is 
 described in the following words, which have a slight 
 mythological colouring : ' What was the stand, the support, 
 what and how was it, from whence the all-seeing Visva- 
 karman produced by his might the earth and stretched 
 out the sky ? The only god who on every side has eyes, 
 mouths, arms and feet, blows (forges) with his two arms 
 and with wings, while producing heaven and earth 2 / 
 
 How vague and uncertain the personal character of Vis- 
 vakarman was in Vedic times, we can see from the fact 
 that the Taittiriya Brahmawa ascribes the very acts here 
 ascribed to Visvakarman to Brahman 3 . At a later time, 
 Visvakarman, the All-maker, became with the Buddhists, 
 as Visvakamma, a merely subordinate spirit, who is sent 
 to act as hairdresser to Buddha* The gods also have their 
 fates ! 
 
 Search for a Supreme Deity. 
 
 The same human yearning for one supreme deity which 
 led the Vedic priests to address their hymns to the Visve 
 Devas or to Visvakarman as the maker of all things, 
 induced them likewise to give a more personal character to 
 Pra^apati. This name, meaning lord- of creatures, is used 
 in the Rig-veda as a predicate of several gods, such as 
 Soma, Savitrt, and others. His later origin has been in- 
 ferred from the fact that his name occurs but three times 
 in the Rig-veda 4 . These arithmetical statistics should, 
 however, be used with great caution. First of all my index 
 
 1 Contributions, II, p. 560. 
 
 a This blving has reference to the forge on which the smith does his 
 work. Wings wfere used instead of bellows, and we must take care not to 
 ascribe angels* wings to Tvashfri Or to any god of Vedic times, unless he is 
 conceived as a bird, and not as a man. 
 
 8 Taitt. Br. II, 8, 9, 6 ; Muir, O. S. T., V, p. 355. 
 
 Muir, O.S.T., V, p, 390. 
 
46 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 verborum is by no means infallible, and secondly pur.Sam- 
 hita of the Rig-vcda is but a segment, probably a very 
 small segment, of the mass of religious poetry that once 
 existed. In the case of Pra^apati I had left out in rny 
 Index one passage, X, 1-21, 10, and though, for very good 
 reasons, I considered and still consider this verse as a later 
 addition, this was probably no excuse for omitting it, like 
 all that is omitted in the Pada-text of the Rig-veda. The 
 whole hymn must have been, as I thought, the expression 
 of a yearning after one supreme deity, who had made 
 heaven and earth, the sea and all : that in them is. But 
 many scholars take it as intended from the very first verse 
 for the individualised god, Pra^apati. I doubt this still, 
 and I give therefore the translation of the hymn as I gave 
 it in 1860, in my 'History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature' 
 (p. 568)- It has been translated many times since, but 
 it will be seen that I have had but little to alter. 
 
 Hymn to the Unknown God. 
 
 1. In the beginning there arose the germ of golden light, Hiranya- 
 garbha; he was the one born lord of all that is. He stablished the earth 
 and this sky Who is the god to whom we should offer our sacrifice? 
 
 2. He who gives life, he who gives strength : whose command all the 
 bright gods revere ; whose shadow is immortality and mortality (gods 
 and men) Who is the god to whom we should offer our sacrifice ? 
 
 3. He who through his power became the sole king of this breathing 
 and slumbering world he who governs all, man and beasW-Who is the 
 god to whom we should offer our sacrifice ? 
 
 4. He through whose greatness these snowy mountains are, and the 
 gf-a, they say, with the Rasa, the distant river, he whose two arms these 
 regions are Who is the god to whom we should offer our sacrifice ? 
 
 5. He through whom the sky is strong, and the earth firm, he through 
 whom the heaven was established, nay the highest heaven, he who mea- 
 sured the light in the air Who is the god to whom We should offer our 
 sacrifice? 
 
 6. He to whom heaven and earth (or, the two armies) standing firm by 
 his help, look up, trembling in their minds, he over whom the rising sun 
 shines forth Who is the god to whom we should offer our sacrifice ? 
 
 7. When the great waters went everywhere, holding the germ and 
 generating fire, thence he arose who is the sole life of the bright gods 
 Who is the god to whom we should offer our sacrifice ? 
 
 8. He who by his might looked even over the waters, which gave 
 strength and produced the sacrifice, he who alone is god above all gods 
 Who is the god to whom we should offer our sacrifice ? 
 
 9. May he not destroy i\s, he, the creator of the earth, or he, the 
 righteous, who created the heaven, he who also created the bright and 
 mighty waters Who is the god to whom we should offer our sacrifice ? 
 
HYMN TO TEE UNKNOWN GOD. 47 
 
 Then follows the verse which I treated as a later addition, 
 because it seemed to me that, if Pra(/apatrhad been known 
 by the poet as the god who did all this, he would not have 
 asked, at the end of every verse, who the god was to whom 
 sacrifice should be offered. However, poets have their own 
 ways. But- the strongest argument against the final verse, 
 which my critics have evidently overlooked, is the fact 
 that this verse has not been divided by the Padakara. 
 I still hold, therefore, that it was a later addition, that it is 
 lame and weak, and spoils the character of the hymn. It 
 runs as follows : 
 
 10. 'O Pra</ilpati ? no other but thou has held together all these things ; 
 whatevei* we desire in sacrificing to thee, may that be ours, may we be 
 the lords of wealth/ 
 
 With this conception of Pra#apati as the lord of all 
 created things and as the supreme deity, the monotheistic 
 yearning was satisfied, even though the existence of other 
 gods was not denied. Arid what is curious is that we see 
 the same attempt * repeated again and again. Like Visva- 
 karman and Pragrapati we find such names as Purusha, 
 man ; HiraTiyagarbha, golden germ ; Pra/rca, breath, spirit ; 
 Skambha, support (X, 81, 7); Dhatri, maker; Vidhatri, 
 arranger; Namadha, name-giver of the gods, oz/o/xaroflcV?;? 
 and others, all names for the Eka Deva, the one god, 
 though not, like Pragapati, developed into full-grown divine 
 personalities. These names have had different fates in 
 later times. Some A meet us again during the Brahma?ia 
 period and in the Atharvar^a hymns, or rise to the surface 
 in' the more modern pantheon of India ; others have disap- 
 peared altogether after a short existence, or have resumed 
 their purely predicative character. But the deep groove 
 which they made in the Indian mind has remained, and to 
 the present day the religious wants of the great mass of 
 the people in India seem satisfied through the idea of the 
 one supreme god, exalted above all other gods, whatever 
 names mey have been given to him. Even the gods: of 
 modern times such as $iva and Vishnu, nay goddesses even, 
 such as Kali, Parvati, Durga, are but new names for what 
 
 1 M. M., Theosophy, pp. 244 seq. 
 
48 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 was originally embodied in the lord of created things 
 (Pra</apati) and the maker of all things (Visvakarman). 
 In spite of their mythological disguises, these modern gods 
 have always retained in the eyes of the more enlightened 
 of their worshippers traces of the character of omnipotence 
 that was assigned even in Vedic times to the one supreme 
 god, the' god above all gods. 
 
 Brahman, Atman, Tad Ekam. 
 
 We have now to take another step in advance. By the 
 side of the stream of thought which we have hitherto 
 followed, we see in India another powerful movement 
 which postulated from the first more than a god above, yet 
 among, other gods. .In the eyes of more thoughtful men 
 every one of the gods, called by a personal and proper 
 name, was limited ipso facto, and therefore not fit to fill 
 the place which was to be filled by an unlimited and abso- 
 lute power, as the primary cause of all created things. No 
 name that expressed ideas connected with the male or 
 female sex, not even Pra^apati or Visvakarman, was con- 
 sidered as fit for such a being, and thus we see that as 
 early as the Vedic hymns, it was spoken of as Tad Ekam, 
 that One, as neither male nor female, that is, as neuter. 
 We come across it in the hymn of Dirghatamas (1, 164, 6' 1 ), 
 where, after asking who he was that established .these six 
 spaces of, the world, the poet asks, ' Was it perhaps the One 
 (neuter), in the shape of the Unborn (rnasc.) ? ' This should 
 be read in connection with the famous forty-sixth verse:- 
 
 'They call (it) Indra, Mitra and Varwia, Agni: then 
 (oomes) the heavenly bird Garutman; that which is the 
 One, the poets call in many ways, they call it Agni, Yama, 
 Matarisvan.' 
 
 Here we see the clear distinction between the One that 
 is named and the names, that is, the various gods, and 
 again between the One without form or the unborn, that 
 
 1 This hymn, the author of which is called Dirghatnmas, i.e. Long 
 Darkness, is indeed full of obscure passages. It has been explained by 
 Hau (Vedische Riithselfragen und Riithselspriiche, 1875) and more suc- 
 cessfully by Deussen, in his Allgemeine Geschichte dei* Philosophic, 
 p. 108. but it still cqntains much that has to be cleared up. 
 
NASADITA HYMN. 49 
 
 is, the inmanifested, and those who established the whole 
 world. This One, or the Unborn, is mentioned also in X, 
 82, 6, where we read - The One is placed in the nave, of the 
 unborn where all beings rested/ Again in a hymn to the 
 Visve Devas, III, 54, 8, the poet, when speaking of heaven 
 and earth, says : 
 
 'They keep apart all created things, and tremble not, 
 though bearing the great gods ; the One rules over all that 
 is unrnoving and that moves, that walks or flies, being 
 differently born/ 
 
 The same postulated Being is most fuljy described in 
 hymn X, 129, i, of which I likewise gave a translation in 
 my ' History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature ' (1859), P- 5^9* 
 It has been frequently translated siiice, but the meaning 
 has on the whole remained much the same. 
 
 Sfasadiya Hymn. 
 
 1. There was then neither what is nor what is not, there was no sky, 
 nor the heaven which is beyond. What covered? Where was it, and in 
 whose shelter? Was the water the deep abyss (in which it lay) ? 
 
 2. There \yas no death, hence was there nothing immortal. There was 
 no light (distinction) between night and day. That One breathed by 
 itself without breath, other than it there has been nothing. 
 
 3> Darkness there was, in the beginning all this was a sea without 
 light ; the germ that lay covered by the husk, that One was born by the 
 power of heat (Tapas). 
 
 4. Love overcame it in the beginning, which was the seed springing 
 from mind; poets having search d in their heart found by wisdom the 
 bond of what is in what is not. 
 
 5. Their ray which was stretched across, was it below or was it above? 
 There were seed-bearers, there were powers, self-power -below, and will 
 above. 
 
 6. Who then knows, who has declared it hew, from whence was born 
 this creation ? The gods came later than this creation, who then knows 
 whence it arose? 
 
 7. He from whom this creation arose, whether he made it or did not 
 make it, the Highest Seer in the highest heaven, he forsooth knows ; or does 
 even he not know ? 
 
 There are several passages in this hymn which, in spite 
 of much labour spent on them by eminent scholars, remain 
 as obscure now as they were to me in 1859. The poet 
 himself is evidently not quite clear in his own mind, and 
 he is constantly oscillating between a personal and imper- 
 sonal or rather superpersonal cause from whence the uni- 
 
 E 
 
50 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 verse emanated. But the step from a sexual to a sexless 
 
 d, from a mythological TiyxSro? to a metaphysical TT/XOTW, 
 evidently been made at that early time, and with it 
 the decisive step from mythology to philosophy had been 
 taken. It is strange to meet with this bold guess in a 
 collection of hymns the greater part of which consists of 
 what must seem to us childish petitions addressed to the 
 numerous Devas or gods of nature. Even the question 
 whibh in Europe was asked at a much later date, where 
 the Creator could have found a TTOV orS for creating the 
 world out of matter or out of nothing, had evidently 
 passed through the minds of the Vedic seers when they 
 asked, Rv. X, 81, 2 and 4: 'What was the stand, what was 
 the support, what and how was it, from whence the all- 
 seeing Visvakarman produced by his might the earth and 
 stretched out the sky?' These startling outbursts of 
 philosophic thought seem indeed to require the admission 
 of a long continued effort of meditation and speculation 
 before .so complete a rupture with the old conception of 
 physical gods* could have .become possible. We must not, 
 however, measure every nation with the same measure. It 
 is not necessary that the historical progress of thought, 
 whether religiouB or philosophical, should have been exactly 
 the same in every country, nor must we forget that there 
 always have been privileged individuals whose mind was 
 untrammelled by the thoughts of the great mass of the 
 people, and who saw and proclaimed, as if inspired by 
 a power not themselves, truths far beyond- the reach of 
 their fellow men. It must have required considerable bold- 
 ness, when surrounded by millions who never got tired of 
 celebrating the mighty deeds achieved by such Devas as 
 Agni, Indra, Soma, Savitri, or VaruTia, to declare that 
 these gods were nothing but names of a higher power 
 which was at first without any name at all, called simply 
 Tad Ekam, that One, and afterwards addressed by such 
 dark names as Brahman and Atman. The poets who utter 
 these higher truths seem fully conscious of their own 
 weakness in grasping them. Thus, in I, 167, 5 and 6, thQ 
 poet says : 
 
 1 As a fool, ignorant in my own mind. I ask for the hidden places of the 
 
NASADIYA BYMN. 5 1 
 
 gods ; the sages, in order to weave, stretched the seven strings over the 
 newborn calf 1 .' 
 
 ' Not having discovered I ask the sages who may have Discovered, not 
 knowing, in order to know : he who supported the six skies in the form 
 of the unborn was he perchance that One ? * 
 
 And .again in ver. 4 of the same hymn : 
 
 'Who has seen the firstborn, when he who had no bones (no form) 
 bears him that has bones (form) ? Where is the breath of the earth, the 
 blood, the self? Who went to one who knows, to ask this ?' 
 
 In all this it is quite clear that the poets themselves 
 who proclaimed the great truth of the One, as the sub- 
 stance of all the gods, did not claim any inspiration ab 
 extra, but strove to rise by their own exertions out of the 
 clouds of their foolishness towards the perception of a 
 higher truth. The wise, as they said, had perceived in 
 their heart what was the bond between what is and what 
 is not, between the visible and the invisible, between the 
 phenomenal and the real, and hence also between the indi- 
 vidual gods worshipped by the multitude, and that One 
 Being which was free from the character of a mere Deva, 
 entirely free from mythology, from parentage and sex, 
 and, if endowed with personality at all, then so far only 
 as personality was necessary for will. This was very 
 different from the vulgar personality ascribed by the 
 Greeks to their Zeus or Aphrodite, nay even by many 
 Jews and Christians to their Jehovah or God. All this 
 represented an enormous .progress, and it is certainly 
 difficult to imagine how it could have been achieved at 
 that early period and, as it were, in the midst of prayers 
 and sacrifices addressed to a crowd of such decidedly 
 personal and mythological Devas as Indr& and Agni and 
 all the rest. Still it was achieved; and whatever is the 
 age when the collection of our Rig-veda-samluta was 
 finished, it was before that age that the conviction had 
 been formed that there is but One, One Being, neither 
 male nor female, a Being raised high above all the con- 
 ditions and limitations of personality and of human nature, 
 
 1 This calf seems meant for the year, and in the seven strings we might 
 see a distant recollection of a year of seven seasons; see Galen, v. 347. 
 Pragapati is often identified with the year. 
 
 E 2 
 
52 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 and nevertheless the Being that was really mean!, by all 
 such names as Indra, Agni, Mataris^an, nay even by the 
 name of Pra^apati, lord of creatures. In fact the Vedic 
 poets had arrived at a conception of the Godhead which 
 was reached once more by some of the Christian philo- 
 sophers of Alexandria, but which even at present is beyond 
 the reach of many who call themselves Christians. 
 
 Before that highest point of religious speculation was 
 reached, or, it may be, even at the same time, for chronology 
 is very difficult to apply to the spontaneous intuitions of 
 philosophical truths, many efforts had been made A in the 
 same direction. Such names as Brahman and Atman, 
 which afterwards became so important as the t f vo main 
 supports of Vedanta-philosophy, or Purusha, the name of 
 the transcendent soul as used in the Samkhya system, 
 do not spring into life without a long previous incubation. 
 
 Brahman, its various 
 
 If then we find Brahman used as another name of whaf 
 before was called Tad Ekam, That One, if later on we meet 
 with such questions as 
 
 ' Was Brahman the first cause ? Whence are we born ? 
 By what do we live? Whither are we hastening? By 
 whom constrained do we obtain our lot in life whether 
 of happiness or of misery, O ye knowers of Brahman? 
 Is time, is the nature of things, is necessity, is accident, 
 are the elements, or is Purusha to be considered the 
 source ? ' 
 
 We naturally ask, first of all, whence came these names ? 
 What did Brdhrnan mean so as to become fit to signify 
 Ttf JzTecs ov't It is curious to observe how lightly chis 
 question has been answered 1 . Br&hman, it was said by 
 >r. Haug, means prayer, and was derived from the root 
 Barh or Brih. to swell or to grow, so that originally it 
 would have meant what swells or grows. He then assigned 
 to Br&hrnan the more abstract meaning of growth and 
 welfare, and what causes growth and welfare, namely 
 sacred songs. Lastly, he assigned to Br&hman the meaning 
 
 1 M. M., Theosopliy, p. 240. 
 
BRAHMAN, ITS VARIOUS MEANINGS. 53 
 
 of force as manifested in mature, and that of universal 
 force as the Supreme Peing. I confess I can see no con- 
 tinuity in this string o thought. Other scholars, however, 
 have mostly repeated the same view. Dr. Muir starts from 
 Brahman in the sense of prayei', while with the ordinary 
 change of accent Brahman means he who prays. 
 
 Here the first question seems to be how Brahman could 
 have corne to mean prayer. Prof. Roth maintained that 
 Brahman expressed the force of will directed to the gods ; 
 and he gave as the first meaning of Brahman, 'Die cds 
 Drang und F Lille des Gemuths au/tretende ^tmd den 
 G otter n zustrebende Andacht,' words difficult to render 
 into intelligible English. The second meaning, according 
 to him, is a sacred or magic formula ; then sacred and 
 divine words, opposed to ordinary language ; sacred wisdom, 
 holy life; lastly, the absolute or impersonal god. These 
 are mighty strides of thought, but how are they to be 
 derived one from the other'? 
 
 Prof. Deusseri (p. TO) sees in Brahman 'prayer/ the 
 lifting up of the will above one's own individuality of 
 which we become conscious in religious meditation. I must 
 confess that here too there seem to be several missing links 
 in the chain of meanings. Though the idea of prayer as 
 swelling or exalted thought may be true with us, there is 
 little, if any, trace of such thoughts in the Veda. Most 
 of the prayers there are very matter-of-fact petitions, and 
 all that has been said of the swelling of the heart, the 
 elevation of the mind, the fervid impulse of the will, as 
 expressed by the word Brahman, soems to me decidedly 
 modern, and without any analogies in the Veda itself. 
 When it is said that the hymns make the gods grow 
 (Vr*dh), this is little more than what we mean by saying 
 that they magnify the gods (Deussen, 1. c., p. 245). Even 
 it: a more profound intention were supposed to be necessary 
 for the word Brahman in the sense of prayer, there would 
 be nothing to prevent its having originally grown out 
 of Brahman in the sense of word. Of course we cannot 
 expect perfect certainty in a matter like this, when we 
 are trying to discover the ahnost imperceptible transitions 
 by which a root which expresses the idea of growing forth 
 
54 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 (Vriddhau), growing strong, bursting forth, increasing, 
 came to supply a name for prayer as well as for deity. 
 This evolution of thought must have taken place long 
 before the Vedic period, long before the Aryan Separation, 
 long before the final constitution of the Aryan language 
 of India. We can but guess therefore, and we should 
 never forget this in trying to interpret the faint traces 
 which the earliest steps of the human mind have left on 
 the half-petrified sands of our language. That Brahman 
 means prayer is certain, and that the root Brih meant 
 to grow, ^0 break forth, is equally certain, and admitted 
 by 1 all. What is uncertain are the intermediate links 
 connecting the two. 
 
 I suppose, and I can say no more, that Vrih or Brih, 
 which I take to be a parallel form of VrMh, to grow, meant 
 to grow, to come forth, to spread. Hence Brihat means 
 simply great (like great from growing), broad, strong, 
 BarhishtfAa, strongest. We should note, however, though 
 we cannot attribute much importance to the fact, that 
 Brirahati and Brimhayati also were quoted by Indian 
 grammarians in the sense of speaking and shining. Here 
 we can see that speaking could originally have had the 
 meaning of uttering, and that ' word ' has been conceived 
 as that which breaks forth, or is uttered, an utterance (Aus- 
 druck), as we say. 
 
 The next step to consider is the name Bfihaspati. We 
 must start from the fact that Brihaspati is synonymous 
 with Va/cas-pati, lord of speech. Unless Brih had once 
 meant speech, it would have been impossible to form such 
 a name as T3rhas-pati, as little as Brahman as-pati could 
 have been possible without Br&hman \ 
 
 From this point once gained I make the next step and 
 suppose that Br&h-man was formed to express what was 
 uttered, what broke forth, or shone forth, that is, the word 
 or speech. If we have arrived at this, we can easily under- 
 stand how the general concept of word was specialised in 
 the sense both of sacred utterance or formula and of prayer; 
 without any idea of swelling meditation or lifting up of 
 
 1 See A'Mnd. Up. I, a, n, vag ghi brt'bati, tasyu csha patiA , and VII, 
 ti f 2, yo va/cam brahma *ity upa*ate. Ofc Briii. I, 3, 20. 
 
AND BRAHMAN, WORD. 55 
 
 hearts, so alien to Vedic poets, such as they are known to 
 us. But if I am right in seeing in Brahman the original 
 meaning of what breaks forth, of a force that manifests 
 itself in audible speech, it will become easy to understand 
 how Brahman couid also, from the very beginning though 
 in a different direction, have been used as a riame of that 
 universal force which manifests itself in the creation of 
 a visible universe. We need not suppose that it had to 
 ascend a scale first from holy word, holy wisdom to the 
 source of that wisdom, the absolute god. 
 
 Brtli and Brahman, Word. 
 
 We may suppose therefore I say no more that Brah- 
 man meant force or even germ, so far as it bursts forth, 
 whether in speech or in nature *. But now comes a much 
 more perplexing question. It can hardly be doubted that 
 Vrih or Brih is a parallel form of Vridh ; and it is a well- 
 known fact that both the Latin verbum and the German 
 Wort can be regularly derived from the same root, cor- 
 responding to a possible Sanskrit Vr/h-a or Vr?'dh-a. In 
 that case Brahman also may be taken as a direct derivation 
 in the sense of the uttered word, and brahman as the 
 speaker, the utterer. So far we are still on safe ground, 
 and in the present state of our knowledge I should not 
 venture to go much beyond. But Colebrooke and other 
 Vedic scholars have often pointed out the fact that in the 
 Veda already we find a goddess Va&, speech, which we met 
 in Va/cas-pati and Srfhas-pitr*, the lord of speech. This 
 Va/c, as Colebrooke pointed out as early as 1805, was 'the 
 active power of Brahma, proceeding from him 3 / After 
 reading Colebrooke's remarks on it, few Sanskrit scholars 
 could help being reminded of. the Logos or the Word that 
 was in the beginning, that was with God, and by whom 
 all things were made. The important question, however, 
 
 1 Divyud&'-a Datta quotes a passage from the Yognvasisht&a : l Brahma- 
 vrfwhaiva hi j/agiigr, </agaA; fca brahinavnwlmnam ' (Vedantism, p. 28). 
 
 3 In the Rig-veda we have only vaVca/t pate, X, 1 66, 3, as two words ; 
 and again patim vafcafe, IX,. a6, 4. Br&hmanas pati/i occurs frequently in 
 Rig-veda, as It, 23, i, gfyegh^iara^am brdhmanam brahmanas pate, &c. 
 
 3 Miscellaneous Essays, I, p. 98. 
 
56 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 which, even after Colebrooke's remarks, remained still 
 undecided, was whether this idea o* the creative Word 
 was borrowed by the Greeks from India, or by the Indians 
 from Greece, or whether it was an idea that sprang up 
 independently in both countries. This is a question the 
 answer of which must lead to the most far-reaching con- 
 sequences. Professor Weber in his * Indische Studien/ IX, 
 473, published an article with the object of showing that 
 * the Logos-idea had no antecedents in Greece to account 
 for it/ This was certainly a startling assertion, but in the 
 face of wfell-known facts he added : * Without wishing to 
 give a decision on this question, the surmise is obvious, 
 considering the close relations at that time existing between 
 Alexandria and India, that the growth of this Neoplatonic 
 idea was influenced by the like views of the philosophical 
 systems of India/ He says again, ' that it may have been 
 simply on account of the invigorating influence which the 
 gods were believed to derive from the hymns, that the 
 goddess of Speech was conceived as furnishing to Pra^apati 
 the strength of creation, though at last, particularly in 
 the shape of Om, she obtained the highest position, being 
 identified with the absolute Brahman/ 
 
 I hope I have thus given a correct account of Professor 
 Weber's somewhat vague yet startling assertion, that the 
 Alexandrian Logos idea had no antecedents in Greek philo- 
 sophy, but was influenced by the Vedic Va&. There are, 
 no doubt, similarities, but there are dissimilarities also 
 which ought not to be ignored. To say nothing else, VaJk 
 is a feminine, Logos a masculine, and that involves more 
 than a difference of grammatical gender. 
 
 I have tried to show in my * Lectures on Theosophy/ 
 that the facts of the case lead us' to a very different, nay 
 to the very opposite, opinion. If I did not enter on a dis- 
 cussion of the arguments which were intended to prove 
 the absence of antecedents of the Alexandrian Logos idea 
 in Greek philosophy, it was because I thought it better to 
 state the facts as they really are, without entering on any 
 useless controversy, leaving classical and Sanskrit scholars 
 to form their own conclusions. While Professor Weber 
 had asserted that the Logos appears in Alexandria without 
 
Bi?/El AND BRAHMAN, WORD. 57 
 
 any preparatory steps, I did my best to point out these 
 very steps leading up to the Logos, which are very well 
 known to every student of the early history of Greek 
 philosophy l . If I have succeeded in this, the presumption 
 in favour of any Indian influence having been exercised on 
 the philosophers of Alexandria, would tall to the ground 
 of itself, and the claims' of India and Greece would be 
 equal so far as the original idea of the Word, as a potentia 
 of the absolute Being, was concerned. * Real Indian philo- 
 sophy/ I had said before, * even in that embryonic f orm in 
 which we find it in the Upanishads, stands completely by 
 itself. We cannot claim for it any historical relationship 
 with th# earliest Greek philosophy. The two are as inde- 
 pendent of each other as the Greek Charis, when she has 
 become the wife of Hephaestos, is of the Haritas, the red 
 horses of the Vedic Dawn ' (p. 79). 
 
 Then the question arose, was there at least a distant 
 relationship, such as exists between Charis and the Haritas, 
 between Zeus and Dyaus, between Va& and the Logos 
 also ? As there were no linguistic indications whatever in 
 support of such a view, I arrived in the end at the conclu- 
 sion, that striking as are the coincidences between the Yedic 
 Va/c and the Greek Logos, we must here also admit that 
 what was possible in India was possible in Greece likewise, 
 and that we have no evidence to support us in any further 
 conclusions. In all this I thought that facts would speak 
 far better than words. It is quite true that Professor 
 Weber was careful to add the clause ' that he did not intend 
 to give any opinion on this question/ but after such a con- 
 fession it is hardly becoming to hint that those who have 
 given an opinion on this question, had derived their infor- 
 mation from him. It is easy to state the pros and cons, 
 the.Pftrvapakshaa,nd the Uttarapaksha, but both are meant 
 in the end to lead on to the Siddhanta, the conclusion. 
 Even stronger coincidences between Va& and the Sophia 
 of the Old Testament 2 might have been adduced, for as 
 we read of Va& as the companion of Prar/apati 3 , Wisdom, 
 
 1 Theosophy, p. 384, The Historical Antecedents of the Logos. 
 
 2 M. M., Theosophy, p. 381. 
 8 Kanaka 12, 5 (37, i). 
 
5 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 in Prov. viii. 30, is made to say, 'I was by him, as one 
 brought up with him ; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing 
 always before him/ 
 
 While in the Kanaka we read of Va/c being impregnated 
 by Pra^fapati, we read in Prov. viii. 22, 'The Eternal pos- 
 sessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works 
 of old/ 
 
 But with all this I cannot admit that there is any evi- 
 dence of borrowing or of any kind of interaction between 
 Indian and Greek philosophy, and I should have thought, 
 that after the historical antecedents of the Logos and the 
 Logoi in Greece had been clearly laid open, the idea of the 
 Greeks having borrowed their Logos from Vedic Va& or 
 from the O. T. Sophia, would not have been revived. The 
 historical consequences of such an admission would carry 
 us very far indeed, and it would require a far stronger 
 lever to lift and to remove the weight of evidence on the 
 other side than the arguments hitherto brought forward. 
 If the Greeks had really borrowed their idea of the Logos 
 from India, why should they not have adopted any of the 
 consequences that followed from it ? 
 
 East and West. 
 
 This requires some fuller consideration. Every indica- 
 tion of a possible intellectual intercourse between Greeks 
 and Hindus in ancient as well as in more modern times, 
 has been carefully noted and strongly urged of late; but 
 I feel bound to say that, particularly for ancient times, 
 nothing beyond mere possibilities of an exchange of reli- 
 gious or philosophical ideas between Greece and India has 
 as yet been established. It seems not to have been per- 
 ceived that an exchange of philosophical thought is very 
 different from an adoption of useful arts, such as alphabetic 
 writing, astronomical observations, coined money, or articles 
 of trade whether jewels, wood, or clothing materials. It is 
 only a philosopher that can teach or influence a philosopher, 
 and even in the cases of two such men meeting, the diffi- 
 culties of an interchange of thought, without a perfect 
 knowledge of the languages, arc far greater than we 
 imagine. We have an instance of a foreign philosopher 
 
EAST AND WEST. 59 
 
 becoming a proficient in the philosophical language of India 
 in the case of Hiouen-thsang. Has he left any trace of 
 Chinese thought, whether derived from Confucius or Lao- 
 tze, in India? Modern missionaries, if unsuccessful in 
 conversions, may, no doubt, have left some imprint of 
 Christianity and European philosophy on the native mind, 
 but the position of the Christian missionary in India, 
 accredited by membership in the ruling race, is very differ- 
 ent from what the position of a few Buddhist monks could 
 possibly have been in ancient times, even if they had 
 reached Alexandria, and learnt to speak and converse on 
 certain subjects in Greek or Egyptian. A courier may be 
 very conversant with French or Italian, but let him tryto 
 discuss metaphysical questions, or even to translate a book 
 of Vico's into English, and it will be perceived what differ- 
 ence there is between an interpreter and a philosopher 
 capable of discussing religious and metaphysical problems. 
 
 That there was a time when the ancestors of the Aryan 
 speakers had the same language a,nd held many of their 
 mythological and religious names and ideas in common, is' 
 no longer doubted, though, even here, we must be satisfied 
 with names, and could not expect common mythological 
 speculations. Later contact between. Indians and Greeks, 
 whether in Persia, Asia Minor, or Greece, assumed no 
 importance till we come to the invasion of Asia Minor, 
 Persia, and India by Alexander the Great. But long 
 before that time both Greeks and Hindus had invented 
 many things, such as kings, priests, numbers, and seasons, 
 marriages and funerals, without our having to imagine that 
 there was at that time any exchange of ideas between the 
 two countries on such points. If then we meet in India as 
 well as in Greece with similar philosophic ideas, as, for 
 instance, with a name meaning atom and with the atomic 
 theory, should we suggest at once that Epicurus must have 
 borrowed his atoms from Kanada, or Kamula his A??,us 
 from Epicurus? It is interesting, no doubt, to point out 
 coincidences between Kapila and Zenon, Pythagoras, Plato 
 and Aristotle, but it is even more interesting to point out 
 the shades of difference in cases where they seem most to 
 agree. If the Vedanta could elaborate an ideal Monism, 
 
60 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 why not the Eleatics as well ? And yet where is tfeere a 
 trace of such a philosophical theory as ,the absolute identity 
 of Atman (the Self), and Brahman (the absolute being), to 
 be found in Greek philosophy ? Who would see more than 
 a very natural coincidence between the Sanskrit triad of 
 Dharma, virtue, Artha, wealth, Kama, love, and the Platonic 
 ra fcaAa, what is good, ra w^eAt/uta, what is useful, and ra 
 rjbea what is pleasant 1 How widely the triad of thought, 
 word, and deed is spread lias been shown very clearly by 
 my old friend Professor Cowell and others, but no one 
 would venture to accuse either Greeks or Indians of borrow- 
 ing or of theft on such evidence. 
 
 The real character of most of these coincidences between 
 Greek and Hindu philosophy, is best exhibited by the often 
 attempted identification of the names, of Pythagoras, and 
 Buddha-guru. At first sight it is certainly startling, but if 
 traced back to its origin, it evaporates completely. First 
 of all, Buddha-guru does not occur, least of all as a name 
 of the teacher Buddha, and whether as a common Aryan 
 name or as borrowed, Pytha could never be the same as 
 Buddha, or Goras as Guru. The belief in transmigration 
 among the Buddhists, besides being borrowed from the 
 Veda, is very different from that of Pythagoras and other 
 philosophers, both civilised and uncivilised, while ascetic 
 practices were certainly not confined to either India or 
 Greece. 
 
 It is quite true that after Alexander's conquests, and 
 after the establishment of a Bactrian kingdom, in the 
 North of India, there was a more real intercourse even 
 between philosophers of Greek and Indian origin, and 
 many of the facts bearing on this subject have been very 
 carefully put together by Count Goblet d'Alviella in his Ce 
 que I'Tfuie doit a la Greee, 1897. But even he brings for- 
 ward coincidences, which require more convincing proofs. 
 With regard to Indian coinage, it should be observed 
 that the three gods mention (id by Pata/tyali as used for 
 commerce, i.e. on coins, are the very gods found on the 
 earliest Mauryun coins, Siva, Skanda, and Viwikha, cf. Pan,. 
 V 5 3> 99 ; provided that Visakha can refer to K&ina shoot- 
 ing his arrows ? 
 
EAST AND WEST. 6 1 
 
 It cannot be doubted that the art of coining money was 
 introduced into India by the Greeks, and it the images of 
 Indian gods and even of Baddha on ancient coins, may be 
 supposed to have favoured idolatry in India, that too may 
 be admitted. Indian gods, however, were anthropomorphic, 
 had legs and arms, heads, noses and eyes, as early as the 
 Veda, and the absence of workable stone in many parts of 
 India would naturally have been unfavourable to a develop- 
 ment of sculptured idols. The Hindus had a god of love in 
 the Veda, but he was very different from the Kama, imaged 
 on more modern coins as an archer sitting on the back of 
 a parrot. 
 
 We are now in possession of specimens of much earlier 
 Greek workmanship in India, than this Kama on the back 
 of a parrot, nor is there any reason to doubt that the idea 
 of temples or monasteries or monuments, built and carved 
 in stone, carne from Greece, while some of the Indian archi- 
 tecture, even when in stone, shows as clear surviving traces 
 of a native wood-architecture as, for instance, the Lycian 
 tombs. 
 
 The later influence which Christianity is supposed to 
 have exercised in originating or in powerfully influencing 
 the sectarian worship of Krtshfta does riot concern us here, 
 for, if it should be admitted at all, it would have to be 
 referred to a much later period than that which gave rise 
 to the six systems of philosophy. Ever since the beginning 
 of Sanskrit studies, nay even before, these startling simi- 
 larities between Krislma and Christos have been pointed 
 out again and again. But iteration yields no strength to 
 argument, and we are as far as ever from being able to 
 point to any historical channel through which the legends 
 of Christ or Krishna could have travelled. No one can 
 deny the similarities, such as they are, but no one, I believe, 
 can account for them. Some of those who have been most 
 anxious to gather coincidences between the Bhagavad-gita 
 and the New Testament, have been rightly warned by 
 native scholars themselves, that they sliould learn to trans- 
 late both Sanskrit and Greek before they venture to com- 
 pare. It should riot be forgotten that as the'Bhagavad-gita 
 bears the title of Upanishad, it may belong to the end of 
 
62 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 the Upanishad-period, and may, as the late Professor Telang 
 maintained, be older even than the New Testament. If 
 Damascius tells us that there were Brahmans living at 
 Alexandria *, we must riot forget that this refers to the end 
 of the fifth century A.D., and does not help us much even 
 as indicating the way by which the idea of the Creative 
 Word could have reached Clement of Alexandria or Origen. 
 That Clement of Alexandria knew the name of Butta is 
 well known, he even knew that he had been taken for 
 a god. Nor should it be forgotten, that Pantaenus who, 
 according to Eusebius, had preached the Gospel in India, 
 was one of the teachers of Clement. But all this is far 
 from proving that Clement or Origen was able to study 
 the Vedanta-Sfttras or the Buddhist Abhidharmas, or that 
 their opinions were influenced by a few Indian travellers 
 staying at Alexandria who cared for none of these things. 
 
 Some of the coincidences between Buddhism and Christi- 
 anity are certainly startling, particularly by their number, 
 but in several cases they exist on the surface only and are 
 not calculated to carry conviction on one side or the other. 
 I have treated of them on several occasions, for .the last 
 time in my paper on c Coincidences/ but the same coinci- 
 dences, which have been proved to be anything but real 
 coincidences, are repeated again and again. The story cf 
 Buddha sitting under an Indian fig-tree (ficus rdigiosa) has 
 nothing whatever in common with Nathaniel sitting under 
 a Palestinian fig-tree, and the parable *of the Prodigal Son 
 in the Buddhist scriptures is surely very different in spirit 
 from that in the New Testament. There remain quite 
 sufficient similarities to startle and perplex us, without our 
 dragging in what has no power of proving anything. No 
 critical historian would listen for one moment to such 
 arguments as have been used to establish a real exchange 
 of thought between India and Europe in ancient' times. 
 On this point we owe a great deal to students of ethnology, 
 who have pointed out coincidences quite as startling be- 
 tween the religious and philosophical folklore of uncivi- 
 lised and civilised races, without venturing to suggest any 
 
 See Goblet d'Alviella, 1. c., p. 167. 
 
EAST AND WEST. 63 
 
 borrowing or any historical community of origin. The 
 iTinvat 1 bridge, for instance, which seems so peculiar to 
 the Persians, had its antecedents as far back as the Veda, 
 and is matched by a similar bridge among the North 
 American Indians 2 . I say, a similar bridge, for it differs 
 also, as I pointed out, very characteristically from the 
 Persian bridge. Again, it is -well known that the creation 
 of the world by the Word has been discovered among so 
 low a race as the Klainaths 3 , but no one has ventured to 
 say that the two accounts had a common origin or were 
 borrowed one from the other. This should serve as a use- 
 ful warning to those who are so fond of suggesting channels 
 through which Indian thought might have influenced 
 Palestine or Greece, and vice versa. 
 
 No doubt, such channels were there ; neither mountains 
 nor seas would have formed impassable barriers. Besides, 
 Buddhism, as early as the third century B.C., was certainly 
 a missionary religion quite as much as Christianity was 
 at a later time. Alexandria was known by name, as 
 Alasando, to the author of the Mahava?nsa 4 . On the 
 other hand, the name of King Gondaphoros, who is 
 mentioned in the legend of St. Thomas' travels to India, 
 has been authenticated on Indo-Parthian coins as Gondio- 
 phares, likewise the name of his nephew Abdayases, and 
 po&sibly, according to M. S. L^vi, that of Vasu Deva as 
 Misdeos. All this is true, and shows that the way between 
 Alexandria and Benares was wide open in the first century 
 A.D. Nor should* it have been forgotten that in the 
 Dialogues between Milinda and Nagasena we have a well- 
 authenticated case of a Greek king (Menandros), and of 
 a Buddhist philosopher, discussing together some of the 
 highest problems of philosophy and religion. All this is 
 true, and yet we are as far as ever from having discovered 
 a Greek or Indian go-between in flagrante delicto. We 
 have before us ever so many possibilities, nay even proba- 
 bilities, but we could not expect any bond fide historian 
 to accept any one of them as a proof of a real influence 
 
 1 Contributions to the Science of Mythology. 
 
 2 Theosophy, p. 168. 3 Theosophy, p. 383. 
 * Le Comte d'Alviella, 1. c., p. 177. 
 
64 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY 
 
 having been exercised by Greece on India or by India 
 on Greece, at a time when Greek philosophy and religion 
 might still have been amenable to Eastern guides, or Indian 
 schools of thought might have gratefully received fresh 
 impulses from the West. Though the literature of India 
 has no trustworthy chronology, still, unless the whole 
 structure of the literary development of India is once 
 more to be revolutionised, we can hardly imagine that 
 the occurrence of such names as Bodcla and Zarades 
 (Zoroaster) among the followers of Mani, or that of 
 Terebinthos the pupil of Scythiaiios 1 , the very founder 
 of the Maniehaean sect in Babylon, would hqlp us to 
 discover the secret springs of the wisdom of Kapila or 
 Buddha $akya Muni. They may point out whence these 
 heresiarchs derived their wisdom, but they leave the 
 question which concerns us here totally untouched. Gorres, 
 in spite of all his mysticism, was right w^hen he looked 
 for a similarity in technical terms in order to establish 
 an Indian influence on Greek or a Greek influence on 
 Indian philosophy.- His principle was right, though he 
 applied it wrongly. It is the same as in Comparative 
 Mythology. There may be ever so many similarities 
 between two mythologies, such as changes of men and 
 women into animals or plants, worship of trees and 
 ancestors, belief in spirits and visions in sleep or dreams, 
 but one such equation as Dyaus = Zeus, is more convincing 
 than all of them taken together. If people ask why, they 
 might as well ask why the discovery of one coin with the 
 name of Augustus on it is a more convincing proof of 
 Roman influence in India than the discovery of ever so 
 many pieces of uncoined gold. 
 
 To return to the origin of the word Brahman. Tempting 2 
 
 1 It has been suggested that Soytliianos may have been an adaptation 
 of Sakya tbe Scythian, a name of Buddha, and Terebinthos mny contain 
 traces of Them (elder). All this is possible, but no more. 
 
 2 There is a curious passage in Bhartr/hari's Brahiiuikimd which seems 
 to identify Speech and Brahman. Sec Sarvadursaria-sangraha, Bibl. Ind , 
 p. 140: 
 
 Anadinidhanam brahma sahdntaltvam yad ukshnram, 
 Vivartate*rthabhavena prakriyA f/ngato yntha. 
 
EAST AND WEST. 65 
 
 as the distant relationship between Brdhman and Brh, in 
 the sense of speech, with verbwm and Word may be, we 
 could not admit it without admitting at the same time 
 a community of thought; and of deep philosophical thought, 
 at a period previous to the Aryan Separation ; and we 
 certainly have no evidence sufficiently strong to support 
 so bold a hypothesis. What we may carry away from 
 a consideration of the facts hitherto examined is that in 
 India itself Brahman, as a name of the TTP&TGV K.IVOVV, need 
 not have passed through a stage when Brahman meant 
 prayer only, and that Br&hman, prayer, could not have 
 assumed the meaning of the object of prayers, that is, 
 the Universal Spirit, who never required any prayers 
 at all. 
 
 In order to show what direction the thoughts connected 
 with Va& took in the Veda, I shall first of all subjoin 
 here a few passages from the hymns, the Bnihma?ias and 
 Upanishads : 
 
 V&&, speech, speaking in her own name, is introduced 
 in hymn X, 125, also in Atharva-veda IV, 30, as saying: 
 
 ' i. I wander with the Vasus and the Rudras, I wander 
 with the Adityas and the Visve Devas, I support Mitra 
 and Varuwa both, I support Agni and the two Asvins ; 
 
 2. I support the swelling (?) Soma, I support Tvasbtfr^ 
 and Pftshan and Bhaga. I bestow wealth on the zealous 
 offerer, on the sacrilicer who presses Soma. 
 
 3. I am the queen, the gatherer of riches, the knowing, 
 first of those who merit worship ; the gods have thus 
 established me in many places, staying with many, entering 
 into many. 
 
 4. By me it is that he who sees, he who breathes, he 
 'who hears what is spoken, eats food; without knowing 
 it, they rest on me* Hear, one and all ! I tell thee what 
 I believe. (?) 
 
 Brahman without beginning or end, which is the eternal essence 
 
 of speech, 
 Is changed into the form of things, like the evolution of the world. 
 
 Equally strong is the statement of Madhava himself, Spho&khyo nirava- 
 yavo nityafc sabdo brahmaiveti, 'The eternal word which is called S photo 
 and does not consist of parts, is indeed Brahman.' 
 
 5 V 
 
66 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 5. I, even I myself, say this, what is good for gods, 
 and also for men; whomsoever I love, him I make 
 formidable, him I make a Brahman, him a Rishi, him 
 a sage. 
 
 6. I bend the bow for Rudra (the storm-god) that his 
 arrow may strike the hater of Brahman ; I make war for 
 the people, I have entered both heaven and earth. 
 
 7. I bring forth the (my?) father (Dyaus) on the summit 
 of this world, my origin is in the waters, in the sea ; from 
 thence I spread over all beings, and touch yonder heaven 
 with my height. 
 
 8. I indeed spread forth like the wind, to lay hold on all 
 things, beyond the sky, beyond the earth; such have 
 I become through my greatness/ 
 
 I ask, is there any trace in these utterances of the 
 thoughts that led in the end to the conception of the Greek 
 Logos? There is another hymn (X, 71) which is very 
 obscure and has for the first time been rendered more 
 intelligible by Professor Deussen (A. G. P., p. 148), where 
 we meet with some important remarks showing that 
 language formed an object of thought even at that early 
 tinie. But here also there is nothing, as yet, approaching 
 to the conception of the Word as a creative power. We 
 meet' with such observations as that words were made 
 in the beginning in order to reveal what before had been 
 hidden.' This is, no doubt, an important thought, showing 
 that those who uttered it had not yet ceased, like our- 
 selves, to wonder at the existence of such a thing as 
 l&nguage. The struggle for life that is going on among 
 words is alluded to by saying that the wise made speech 
 by mind (Manas), silting as by a sieve the coarsely ground 
 flour. The power of speech is greatly extolled, and elo-' 
 quence is celebrated as a precious gift. All men shout 
 when the eloquent man appears, holding the assembly 
 subdued or spellbound by his words (Sabh&saha), nay 
 he is supposed to remove all sin and to procure sustenance 
 for his friends. The knowledge of all things or, as Deussen 
 says, the knowledge of the origin of things, is taught by 
 the Br&hman. 
 
 We meet with passages of a very similar character, in 
 
MIND AND SPEECH. 67 
 
 various parts of the BrahmaTias. One of the most startling 
 is found in a verse inserted in the Purusha-hymn, as given 
 in the Taittiriya-aranyaka (III, 12, 17), ' I know that great 
 sun-coloured Purusha, when on the verge of ,darkness, he, 
 the wise, rests, addressing them, after having thought all 
 forms, and having made their names/ Here we have only 
 to translate forms by t6r?, and names by \6yoi, and we shall 
 not be very far from the world of thought in which Plato 
 and Aristotle 1 moved. 
 
 But although we can discover in this hymn an apprecia- 
 tion of the mysterious nature of speech, we look in vain 
 for the clear and definite idea that language and thought 
 are one, which can be so clearly read in the Greek word 
 Logos, both word and thought, nor do we find more than 
 plight anticipations of the Neo-platonist dogma that the 
 creation of the universe was in reality an utterance of the 
 hidden thoughts and words of the Deity. 
 
 Mind and Speech. 
 
 The following passages will give some idea of what was 
 thought in India about mind and language and their mutual 
 relation. They may be vague and mystical, but they show 
 at all events that a good deal of thought must have been 
 expended by the early thinkers of India on this problem, 
 the nature of speech and the relation between speech and 
 thought. 
 
 $atap. Brahinana VI, i, i : ' Prar/apati, after having 
 created the Veda (Brahman, neut.), created the waters out 
 of Va/c (speech), for Va/c was his. That was created (sent 
 forth). He then entered the waters with Brahman, i. e. the 
 threefold Veda, and there arose from the water an egg 
 which he touched and commanded to multiply. Then from' 
 the egg there arose first Brahman, neut., that is, the three- 
 fold Veda.' 
 
 Paw/cavimsa Brahmana XX, 14, 2 : ' Pra</apati alone was 
 this, and Va& was his own, VaA as the second. He thought, 
 Let me create (send forth) this VaA, for she will go and 
 become all this.* 
 
 1 See Deussen, 1. c., p. 990. 
 
 F 2 
 
68 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Satap. Brahin. VII, 5, 2, 21 : 'The unborn is \&7s, and 
 from VM A Vi,svaka,rman (the all-maker) begat living beings/ 
 
 Brih. Ar. Up. I, 5, 3 : * The Atman consists of speech, 
 mind, and breath. There are also the three worlds ; speech 
 is this world, mind the air, breath the sky. The same are 
 the three Vedas, speech the Big-veda, mind the Ya#ur-veda, 
 breath the Sama-veda. The same are gods, ancestors, and 
 men, speech the gods, mind the ancestors, breath men, &c/ 
 
 Brih. Ar. Up. I, i, 24 : 'He desired, let a second body be 
 born of me, and he (death or hunger) embraced speech with 
 his mind/ 
 
 A And ibid. I, 4, 17: 'This world in the beginning was 
 Atman (Self), alone and lonely. He desired, May I have 
 a wife . . . Manas (mind) is the Self, speech the wife, breath 
 the child/ 
 
 The same or very similar and often contradictory ideas 
 occur in later works also. Thus we read in Manu I, 21 : 
 ' In the beginning he (Brahma) fashioned from the words 
 of the Veda, the several names, works, and conditions of all 
 things/ 
 
 And to quote but one' passage from the Mahabharata, 
 anti-parva, 8533 : ' In the beginning Vidya (knowledge, 
 Sophia) without beginning or end, the divine VfiJb (speech) 
 of the Vedas, was sent forth by SvayambM, the self- 
 existent/ 
 
 Samkara, when treating of Sphola * (word), of which we 
 shall have to treat further on, quotes from the Bnh. Ar. 
 Up. I, 2, 4 : 'He with his mind united himself with speech/ 
 and he adds an important verse from some Smriti: 'In 
 the beginning divine Va/c, Speech, eternal, without begin- 
 ning or end. consisting of Veda, was uttered by Svayambhft, 
 from which all activities proceeded ' ; 
 
 And again: 'In the beginning Mahesvara shaped from 
 the words of the Veda the names and forms of all beings 
 and the procedure of all activities/ 
 
 The Laws of Manu, or, more correctly, of the Manavas, 
 the clan of Manu, are no doubt later than the BrahrnaTias, 
 but they often contain old thoughts. 
 
 1 Ved. Sutras I, o, a8. 
 
MIND AND SPEECH. 69 
 
 These utterances, to which many more might be added, 
 are certainly vague, and chaotic, and often contradictory, 
 because they sprang from different minds without any pre- 
 arranged system; but they seem to me to show at all 
 events that thought and language must have occupied the 
 philosophers of India far more than they did the philo- 
 sophers of Greece, and even in later times those of modern 
 Europe. And if some of them assigned the first place to 
 thought and others to speech, this also serves to show that 
 at all events these early guessers did not accept ' language 
 simply as a matter of course, as most of our modern philo- 
 sophers are so apt to do, but tried hard to discover whence 
 it came and what was its true relation to thought. Thus 
 we read in the $atap. Br. I, 4, 5, 8 : l A dispute once took 
 place between Mind and Speech as to which was the better 
 of the two. Both said, "I am excellent." Mind said: 
 <; Surely I am better than thou, for thou. dost not speak 
 anything that is not understood by me, and since thou art 
 only an imitator of what is done by me and a follower in 
 my wake, I am surely better than thou." Speech said : 
 " Surely I am better than thou, for what thou knowest 
 I make known, I communicate." 
 
 ' They went to appeal to Pra</apati for his decision, and 
 Praaapati decided in favour of Mind, &c.' 
 
 In the Anugita (p. 262) we read on the contrary: 'Then 
 the lord of speech was produced, that lord of speech looks 
 up to the mind. First, verily, are words produced, and the 
 mind runs after them.' 
 
 Some of the Brahmanie thinkers say in so many words 
 that Speech is Brahman ($atap. Br, II, i, 4, 10, Vag vai 
 Brahma), and the co-existence of Brzhas-pati and Brah- 
 ma?ias-pati could hardly have failed to suggest to them the 
 identity of Brahman and Brih in the sense of speech, just 
 as every thoughtful Greek must have known that there 
 was a reason why Logos meant both word and thought. 
 But that ancient chapter of thought which lies beyond 
 the childhood of all philosophy is for ever lost to us and 
 can be reconstructed by conjectures only, which, though 
 they produce conviction in some minds, cannot be expected 
 to produce the same in all. 
 
7O INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Taking into account all these scattered indications; 1 
 cannot bring myself to accept the e\olution of the various 
 meanings of the word Brahman as elaborated by former 
 scholars. I am particularly reluctant to differ on such a 
 point from Professor Deussen. Professor Deussen holds 
 that Brahman had a ritualistic origin (p, 239), and from 
 prayer came to mean he who is prayed to, the Urgrund 
 der Welt He calls it der zwm Heiligen, Gottlichen empor- 
 strebende Wille des Menschen, which is much the same idea 
 to which fioth and others have given currency, but which 
 certainly requires a fuller justification. Instead of begin- 
 ning with the specialised meaning of prayer, whether 
 ritualistic or unpremeditated, and then rising to the object 
 of prayer, I prefer to begin with Br&hman as a synonym 
 of Erih in Brihasp&ti, meaning word or speech, and to 
 admit by the side of it another Br&hman, meaning that 
 which utters or drives forth (Pra&yavayati) or manifests 
 or creates, that which is the universal support (Skambha) 
 or force (Daksha), in fact the Brahman, such as we find it 
 afterwards, whether as a neuter, Brahman. or, for more 
 popular purposes, as a masculine, Brahma x . No doubt in 
 those dark passages through which words passed silently 
 before they, emerged into the full light of literature, we 
 may often fail to discover the right footsteps of their pro- 
 gress, and we must be .prepared for differences of opinion. 
 Sut the really important point is that on which all scholars 
 agree, by assigning to Brahman the final meaning of TO 6V, 
 rb 6V&>s 6V, rd Trpwrou KWOVV, though, even of those terms, 
 as we shall see, not one corresponds fully and exactly to 
 the character of Brdhman as developed in the history of 
 the Indian mind. 
 
 The next word we have to examine is Atman. It is next 
 in importance to Brahman only, and the two together may 
 be called the two pillars on which rests nearly the whole 
 of the edifice of Indian philosophy, more particularly of 
 the Vedanta and Samkhya systems. 
 
 1 Taitt. Br. II, 7, 17, i. 
 
ATMAN. 71 
 
 As early as the time of the Apastamba-Sutras, that is, at 
 the end of the Vedic period, we read, I, 8, 23, i : 
 
 * The BrahmaTia who is wise and recognises all things to 
 be in the Atman, who does not become bewildered when 
 pondering (on it), and who recognises the Atman in every 
 (created) thing, he shines indeed in heaven . . .' 
 
 And in the same Sutras, I, 8, 23, 2, we find a definition 
 of Brahman, as the cause of the world, which presupposes, 
 as clearly as possible, the prevalence of Vedantic ideas l at 
 the time of the author of this Sutra : 
 
 c He who is intelligence itself and subtler than the thread 
 of the lotus-fibre, He who pervades the universe and who, 
 unchangeable and larger than the earth, contains this 
 universe; He who is different from the knowledge of 
 this world which is obtained by the senses and is identical 
 with its objects, possesses the highest (form of absolute 
 knowledge). From him who divides himself, spring all 
 (objective) bodies. He is the primary cause, eternal and 
 unchangeable.' 
 
 The etymology of Atman is again extremely obscure, 
 probably because it belongs to a pre-Sanskritie, though 
 Aryan stratum of Indian speech. However, there can 
 be little doubt that in the Veda Atman, in several places, 
 still means breath, as in Rv. X, 16, 3, suryam Jfc&kshuA 
 ga/cMatu, va'tam atma, words addressed ^ to a dead person, 
 ' May the eye go to the sun, the breath (Atma) to the wind/ 
 It then came to mean vital breath, life, and, like the spirit 
 or breath, was frequently used in the sense of vrhat *we 
 call soul. In some passages it is difficult to say whether 
 we should translate it by life or by spirit. From soul there 
 is but a small step to Self, and that step is often gram- 
 matical rather than real. If -in the Atharva-veda IX, 5, 30 
 we read : 
 
 Atnictnain pitarain putram pautram pitamaham, 
 (ray am #amtrim mataiam ye priyas tan upa hvaye, 
 
 we have to translate in English, ' Myself, father, son, grand- 
 
 1 Yoga and Mimarnsti also are mentioned by name in the Apastamba- 
 Sntras, but not yet as definite systems of philosophy. Cf. I, 8, 23, 5; _ 
 II, 4. 8, 13. 
 
72 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 son, grandfather, wife, mother, whoever are dear, I call 
 upon them/ But Self may here be translated by soul or 
 person also, just as we may say, * My soul doth magnify 
 the Lord/ instead of ' I magnify the Lord/ Again we read, 
 Rv. IX, 113, i, balam ddhanaA atmni, 'putting strength 
 into oneself/ In the end Atman became the regular 
 pronoun self. I need not go through all the evidence 
 which may be seen in any Sanskrit dictionary 1 , but we 
 have still to see at what stage in its development Atman 
 became the definite name of the soul or Self within. This 
 transition of meaning in Atman offers a curious parallel 
 to that of As, in Asu and Asti, which we examined before. 
 There are passages such as Rv. I, 164, 4, bhflmyaA isu& 
 asrik &tma kva svit, * Where was the breath, the blood, the 
 spirit of the world?* Here Atma may be rendered by 
 spirit or life. But in other passages Atman signifies 
 simply the inmost nature of anything, and more par- 
 ticularly of man, so that in the end it means much the 
 same as what medieval philosophers would have called 
 the quiddity, or Indian philosophers the Idanta of things. 
 Thus we read at first &tinanam atman& pa.sya, ' see thy 
 Self by thy Self ; ' atmaiva hy &trnana/i sakshi, * Self is 
 the witness of Self/ In this sense Atman is afterwards 
 used as the name of the highest person, the soul of the 
 world (Paramatnian), and we read ($atap. Br. XIV, 5, 5, 15): 
 sa va ayam atma sarvesham^ bh&tanam adliipatiA, sarve- 
 sham bhfttanam ra#a, ' That Atman is the sovereign of all 
 beings, he is the king of all beings/ 
 
 Pra^&pati, Brahman, Atman. 
 
 We have thus seen three words growing up in the hymns 
 and Brahmanas of the Veda, Prac/apati, Brahman, and 
 Atman, each of which by itself represents in mice a whole 
 philosophy or a view of the world. In Pra#apati we have 
 the admission of a personal and supreme being, a god above 
 all gods, a creator and ruler of the world. He created the 
 primeval waters and rose from them as Hirawyagarbha, 
 
 1 See Anthropological Religion, pp. 200 seq. ; Theosophy, pp. 247 seq., 
 or more recently, Deussen's Geschichte der Philosophic, pp. 324 seq. 
 
PRACZAPATI, BRAHMAN, ATM AN. 73 
 
 in order to send forth, to animate, and to rule all things. 
 Whether this Pra#apati was himself the material cause 
 of the world may seem doubtful. Many times it is said 
 that he was everything and that he desired to become 
 many, and thus created the world, in which case matter 
 also would have come out of him. In other places, how- 
 ever, the primeval waters seem to have been admitted as 
 existing by themselves and apart from Prac/apati (Rv. X, 
 121, 7). We also read that in the beginning there was 
 water over which Pra t gapati breathed as wind and produced 
 the earth, or that the waters themselves produced a golden 
 egg from whence arose Pragfapati, the creator of gods and 
 men. There occur even in the Brahma^as allusions to the 
 legend well known from the Puramis, that a boar brought 
 forth (Udbabarha or Udvavarha from Vrih) the earth, 
 or that a tortoise supported it 1 . 
 
 A belief in that Pra^apati, as a personal god, was the 
 beginning of monotheistic religion in India, while the 
 recognition of Brahman and Atman, as one, constituted 
 the foundation of all the monistic philosophy of that 
 country. 
 
 1 M. M., India, pp. 134, 287. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE SYSTEMS OP PHILOSOPHY. 
 Growth of Philosophical Ideas. 
 
 WE have thus learnt the important lesson that all these 
 ideas, metaphysical, cosmological, and otherwise, burst forth 
 in India in great profusion and confusion, and without any 
 preconceived system. 
 
 We must not suppose that these ideas follow each other 
 in chronological succession. Here once more the Neben- 
 einander gives us the true key, much more than the 
 Nacheinander. We must remember that this earliest philo- 
 sophy existed for a long time without being fixed by 
 writing, that there was neither control, authority, nor 
 public opinion to protect it. Every Asrama or settlement 
 was a world by itself, even the -simplest means of com- 
 munication, such as high-roads or rivers, being often want- 
 ing. The wonder is that, in spite of all this, we should 
 find so much unity ii\ the numerous guesses at truth pre- 
 served to us among these Vedic ruins. This was due, we 
 are told, to the Parampara, i. e. to those who handed down 
 the tradition and at last collected whatever could be saved 
 of it. It would be a mistake to imagine that there was 
 a continuous development in the various meanings assumed 
 by or assigned to such pregnant terms as Prapapati, 
 Brahman, or even Atman. It is much more in accordance 
 with what we learn from the Brfthmanos and Upanisbads 
 of the intellectual life of India, to admit an infinite number 
 of intellectual centres of thought, scattered all over the 
 country, in which either the one or the other view found 
 influential advocates. We should then understand better 
 
PRASTHANA BHBDA. 75 
 
 how Brahman, while meaning what bursts or drives forth, 
 came to signify speech and A prayer, as well as creative 
 power and creator, and why Atman meant not only breath, 
 but life, spirit, soul, essence, or what I have ventured to 
 render by the Self, das Sdbst^ of all things. 
 
 But if in the period of the Brahnianas and Upanishads 
 we have to find our way through religious and philo- 
 sophical thoughts, as through clusters of thickly tangled 
 creepers, the outlook becomes brighter as soon as we 
 approach the next period, which is characterised by per- 
 sistent attempts at clear and systematic thought. We 
 must not imagine that even then we can always discover 
 in the various systems of philosophy a regular historical 
 growth. The Sutras or aphorisms which we possess of the 
 six systems of philosophy, each distinct from the other, 
 cannot possibly claim to represent the very first attempts 
 at a systematic treatment ; they are rather the last summing 
 up of what had been growing up during many generations 
 of isolated thinkers, 
 
 Prasth&na Bheda. 
 
 What the Brahmans themselves thought of their philo- 
 sophical literature we may learn even from such modern 
 treatises as the Prasthana-bheda, from which I gave some 
 extracts by way of introduction to some papers of mine on 
 one of the systems of Indian philosophy, published as long 
 ago as 1852 in the Journal of the German Oriental Society. 
 It is but fair to state that the credit of having discovered 
 that tract of Madhusiidana Sarasvati, and perceived its 
 importance, belonged really to Colebrooke. I myself came 
 to be acquainted with it through my old friend, Dr. Trithen, 
 who had prepared a critical edition of it, but was prevented 
 by illness and death from publishing it. It was published in 
 the meantime by Professor Weber in his Indische Studien, 
 j 849, and I think it may be useful to give once more some 
 extracts from it l . 
 
 1 A new translation of the Prasthaua-bheda lias been published by 
 Prof. Deussen as an Introduction to his Allgemeine Geschichte der 
 Philosophic, vol. i, p. 44, 1894. 
 
76 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 ' Nyaya 1 / he writes, * is logic 2 , as promulgated by Gotarna 3 
 in five Adhyayas (lessons). Its object is knowledge of the 
 nature of the sixteen Padarthas by means of name, defini- 
 tion, and examination/ These Padarthas are the important 
 or essential topics of the Nyaya philosophy; but it has 
 proved very misleading to see Padartha here translated by 
 categories. No one could understand why such things as 
 doubt, example, wrangling, &c., could possibly be called 
 categories or praed,icahilia, and it is no wonder that Bitter 
 and others should have spoken of the Nyaya with open 
 contempt, as they have done, if such things were repre- 
 sented to them as the categories of Indian logic. 
 
 ' There is also the Vaiseshika philosophy in ten lessons, 
 promulgated by Kanda. Its object is- to establish by their 
 similarities and dissimilarities 4 the six Badarthas, viz. : 
 
 1. Dravya, substance. 
 
 2. Guna, quality. 
 
 3. Karman, activity. 
 
 4. Samanya, what is general and found in more than one object. The 
 highest Samanya is Satta or being. 
 
 5. Visesha, the differentia or what is special, residing in eternal 
 atoms, &c. 
 
 6. Samavaya, inseparable inherence, as between cause and effect, parts 
 and the whole, c. 
 
 To which may be added 
 
 7. Abh/iva, negation. 
 
 This philosophy also is called Nyaya/ 
 The,se Padarthas of the Vaiseshikas, at least 1-5, may 
 indeed be called categories, for they represent what can be 
 
 1 Nyaya is derived from ni 'into,' and i Ho go.' The fourth member 
 of a 'syllogism is called Upanaya, * leading towards* or * induction.' 
 Balla'Atynu translates Nyaya by pftioSos. 
 
 a Anvikshiki as an old name of philosophy, more particularly of logic, 
 OCCUYS also in Gautama's Dharrnasastra II, 3. It is used sometimes as 
 synonymous with Mimuwsa, and is more comprehensive than logic. 
 
 3 As the MSS. vary between Gotuma and Gautama, I have kept the 
 former for the Nyayfi, 'philosopher,' the latter for Buddha. 
 
 * Barthelemy St. Hilaire, in his work on Indian Logic, p. 356, remarks, 
 'Kais le philosophe Vai.seshika n'a point cherche* a distinguer lea 
 categories entre elles, en <5riumernnt leurs propriltes, com me Ta fait le 
 S*;agirite. II n'a point montre*, eomme Aristote, leurs rapports et leurs 
 differences.' But this is exactly what he has done, cf. Sutras I, 8 seq. 
 
PRASTHANA BEEDA. 77 
 
 Eredicated, in general, of the objects of our experience, or, 
 :om an Indian point of view, what is predicated by, or 
 what is the highest sense (Artha) of words (Pada). Thus 
 it has come to pass that Padartba, literally the meaning of 
 a word, was used in Sanskrit in the sense of things in 
 genera], or objects. It is rightly translated by category 
 when applied to the five Pad&rthas of Kaw&da, but such 
 a translation, doubtful even in the case of the sixth or 
 seventh Padartha of the Vaiseshikas, would of course be 
 quite misleading when applied to the Padarthas of Gotama. 
 The real categories would, in Ootama's system, find their 
 pjace mostly under Prameya, meaning not so much what 
 has to be proved or established, as what forms the object of 
 our knowledge. 
 
 Madhusftdana continues : * The Mimamsa also is twofold, 
 viz. the Karma-Mimamsa (work-philosophy) and the S&ri- 
 raka-Mim&msd, (philosophy of the embodied spirit). The 
 Karma-Mimamssl has been brought out by the venerable 
 Craimini in twelve chapters/ 
 
 The objects of these twelve chapters are then indicated 
 very shortly, and so as to be hardly intelligible without 
 a reference to the original Sutras. Dharma, the object of 
 this philosophy, is explained as consisting of acts of duty, 
 chiefly sacrificial. The second, third, and fourth chapters 
 treat l of the differences and varieties of Dharma, its parts 
 (or appendent members, contrasted with the main act), and 
 the principal purpose of each sacrificial performance. The 
 fifth chapter tries to settle the order of all sacrificial per- 
 formances, and the sixth the qualifications of its performers. 
 The subject of indirect precepts is opened in the seventh 
 chapter and carried on more fully in the eighth. Inferrible 
 changes, adapting to any variation or copy of certain 
 sacrincial acts what was designed for the types or models 
 of them, are discussed in the ninth, and bars or exceptions 
 in the tenth. Concurrent efficacy is considered in the 
 eleventh chapter, and co-ordinate effect in the twelfth ; that 
 is, the co-operation of several acts for a single result is the 
 
 1 I give this more intelligible description from Colebrooke, Miscellaneous 
 Essays, vol. i, p. 330 seq. 
 
78 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 subject of the one, and the incidental effect of an act, of 
 which the chief purpose is different,, is discussed in the 
 other l . 
 
 'There is also the Sa?rikarshafta-k&?MZa, consisting of 
 four chapters, composed by Gaimini, and this,, which is 
 known by the name of Devata-k&ncfai,, belongs to the 
 Karma-Mimawsa, because it teaches the act called Upasanli, 
 or worship. 
 
 * Next follows the $&riraka-M}ma/wsa, consisting of four 
 chapters. Its A object is to make clear the oneness of 
 Brahman and Atman (Self), and to exhibit the rules, which 
 teach the investigation (of it) by means of Vedic study, &c/ 
 It is in fact much more what we call a system of philosophy 
 than the Purva-Mim&msa, and it is quoted by different 
 names, such as Uttara-Mim&ms&, Brahma-Mimams&, Ve- 
 d&nta, &c. 2 
 
 * In the first lecture is shown the agreement with which 
 all Vedanta passages refer, directly or indirectly, to the 
 inward, undivided, second-less Brahman. In the first section 
 are considered Vedic passages which have clear indications 
 of Brahman ; in the second, passages which have obscure 
 indications of Brahman, and refer to Brahman so far as 
 he is an object of worship; in the third, passages which 
 have obscure indications of Brahman, and mostly refer to 
 Brahman, so far as he or it is an object of knowledge. 
 Thus the consideration of the Vedanta texts has been 
 finished, and in the fourth section such words as Avyakta, 
 A.g&, &c., are considered, of which it can be doubtful 
 whether they may not refer to ideas, adapted and formu- 
 lated by the Samkhya philosophers, such as Pradhana, 
 Prakriti, which is generally, though quite wrongly, trans- 
 lated by nature, as independent of Brahman or Purusha. 
 
 ' The convergence of all Ved&nta texts on the second-less 
 Brahman having thus been established, Vyasa or Badara- 
 yawa, fearing an opposition by means of arguments such as 
 
 1 Professor Deussen has given a somewhat different version of these 
 titles. He gives, for instance, as the subject of the fifth chapter the 
 successive order of recitation, as enjoined by Srtiti, but to judge from 
 Mim. Sutras V, i, i, the right meaning seems to be the * settling of the 
 order of performance, according to Sruti, subject-matter, recitation, &c." 
 
 a Read Adya for Akhya in the Frasthana bheda. 
 
PRASTHANA BHEDA. 79 
 
 have been produced by acknowledged Smritis and various 
 other systems, undertakes their refutation, and tries to 
 establish the incontrovertible validity of his own argu- 
 ments in the second lecture. Here, in the first section, the 
 objections to the convergence of the Vedanta passages on 
 Brahman, as stated by the Smritis of the Samkhya-yoga, 
 the K?iadas, and by the arguments employed by the 
 Samkhyas, are disposed of. In the second section is shown 
 the f aultiness of the views of the followers of the S&mkhya, 
 because every examination should consist of two parts, the 
 establishment of our own doctrine and the refutation of 
 the doctrine of our opponents. In the third section the 
 contradictions between the passages of the Veda, referring 
 to the creation of the elements and other subjects, are 
 removed in the first part, and in the second those referring 
 to individual souls. In the fourth section are considered 
 all apparent contradictions between Vedic passages referring 
 to the senses and their objects. 
 
 f ln the third chapter follows the examination of the 
 means (of salvation). Here in the first section, while con- 
 sidering the going to and returning from another world 
 (transmigration), dispassionateness has to be examined. In 
 the second section, the meaning of the word Thou is made 
 clear, and afterwards the meaning of the word That. In 
 the third section there is a collection of words, if not purely 
 tautological, all referring to the unqualified Brahman, as 
 recorded in different akhas or branches of the Veda ; and 
 at the same time the question is discussed whether certain 
 attributes recorded by other jS&kh&s in teaching a qualified 
 or unqualified Brahman, may be taken together or not. 
 In the fourth section the means of obtaining a knowledge of 
 the unqualified Brahman, both the external, such as sacrifices 
 and observing the four stations in life, and the internal, 
 such as quietness, control, and meditation, are investigated. 
 
 * In the fourth chapter follows an inquiry into the special 
 rewards or fruits of a knowledge of the qualified and un- 
 qualified Brahman. In the first section is described salva- 
 tion of a man even in this life, when free from the influence 
 of good or bad acts, after he has realised the unqualified 
 Brahman by means of repeated study of the Veda, &c. In 
 
8O INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 the second section the mode of departure of a dying man 
 is considered. In the third, the further (northern) road of 
 a man who died with a full knowledge of the unqualified 
 Brahman is explained. In the fourth section the obtain- 
 ment of disembodied aloneness by a man who knows the 
 unqualified Brahman is first described, and afterwards the 
 abode in the world of Brahman, promised to all who know 
 the qualified (or lower) Brahman. 
 
 ' This, the Vedanta, is indeed the principal of all doctrines, 
 any other doctrine is but a complement of it, and therefore 
 it alone is to be reverenced by all who wish for liberation, 
 and this according to the interpretation of the venerable 
 $amkara this is the secret ! ' 
 
 Here we see clearly that Madhusudana considered the 
 Vedanta-philosophy as interpreted by $amkara, if not as 
 the only true one, still as the best of all philosophies. He 
 made an important distinction also between the four, the 
 Nyaya, Vaiseshika, P&rva, and Uttara-MimamsS, on one 
 side, and the remaining two, the Samkhya and Yoga- 
 philosophies on the other. It is curious indeed that this 
 distinction has been hitherto so little remarked. According 
 to Madhusftdana, the philosophies of Gotama and Ka?iada 
 are treated simply as Srnritis or Dharmasastras, like the 
 Laws of Manu, nay like the Mahabharata l of Vyasa, and 
 the RamayaTia of Valmiki. Of course these systems of 
 philosophy cannot be called SmHti in the ordinary sense 
 of Dharmas&stra ; but, as they are Snm'ti or tradition, and 
 not $ruti or revelation, they may be said to teach Dharma, 
 if not in legal, at least in the moral sense of that word. 
 Anyhow it is clear that S&mkhya and Yoga were looked 
 upon as belonging to a class different from that to which 
 the two Mimamsas, nay even Nyaya and Vaiseshika, and 
 the other recognised branches of knowledge belonged, which 
 together are* represented as the eighteen branches of the 
 Trayi (the Veda). Though it may be difficult to understand 
 the exact reason of this distinction, the distinction itself 
 should not be passed over. 
 
 'The Samkhya/ Madhusfldana continues, 'was brought 
 
 1 See Dnhlinann, Das Mahabhftrata als Epos und Rechtsbuch, 1896. 
 
PRASTHANA BHEDA. . 8 1 
 
 out by the venerable Kapila in six Adhyayas. In the first 
 Adhy&ys the objects for discussion are considered ; in the 
 second the effects or products of Pradliana, or original 
 matter; in the third aloofness from sensuous objects; in 
 the fourth stories about dispassionate persons, such as 
 Pingala (IV, n), the fletcher (IV, 18), &c.; in the fifth 
 there is refutation of opposite opinions; in the sixth 
 a resume of the whole. The chief object of the Samkhya- 
 philosophy is to teach the difference between Prakriti and 
 the Purushas. 
 
 'Then follows the Yoga-philosophy as taught by the 
 venerable Pata/?<7ali, consisting of four parts. Here in the 
 first part meditation, which stops the activity and distrac- 
 tion of the mind, and, as a means towards it, repeated 
 practice and dispassionateness, are discussed ; in the second 
 the eight accessories which serve to produce deep medita- 
 tion even in one whose thoughts are distracted, such as 
 (II, 29) restraint, observances, posture, regulation of breath, 
 devotion, contemplation, and meditation ; in the- third, the 
 supernatural powers; in the fourth aloneness. The chief 
 object of this philosophy is to achieve concentration by 
 means of stopping all wandering thoughts/ 
 
 After this follows a short account of the Pasupata and 
 Patt/caratra-systems, and then a recapitulation which is of 
 interest. Here Madhusftdana says, ' that after the various 
 systems have been explained, it should be clear that there 
 are after all but three roads. 
 
 i. The Arambha-vada,the theory of atomic agglomeration. 
 * a. The Parirmma-vada, the theory of evolution. 
 
 3. The Vivarta-vada, the theory of illusion. 
 
 The first theory holds that the four kinds of atoms 
 (ATIU), those of earth, water, fire, and air, by becoming 
 successively double atoms, &c., begin the world which 
 culminates in the egg of Brahman. 
 
 This first theory, that of the Tarkikas (Nyaya and 
 Vaiseshika) and the Mimamsakas, teaches that an effect 
 which was not (the world), is produced through the activity 
 of causes which are. 
 
 The second theory, that of the Samkhyas, Yoga-pa ta/7#a- 
 las, and Pasupatas, says that Pradhana alone, sometimes 
 6 G 
 
82 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 called Prak?'iti or original matter, composed, as it is, 
 of the Gu?*as of Sattva (good), Ra#as (moderate), and 
 Tamas (bad), is evolved through the stages of Mahat (per- 
 ceiving) and Ahamkara (subjectivity) ink) the shape of the 
 (subjective and objective) world. From this point of view 
 the effected world existed before as real, though in a subtile 
 (invisible) form, and was. rendered manifest through the 
 activity of a cause. 
 
 ^Ihe third theory, that of the Brahmavadins (Vedanta), 
 says that the^ self-luminous and perfectly blissful Brahman 
 which has no second, appears by mistake, through its own 
 power of Maya, as the world, while the Vaislmavas 
 (Ramanugra, &c.) hold that the world is an actual and true 
 evolution of Brahman. 
 
 But in reality all the Munis who have put forward these 
 theories agree in wishing to prove the existence of the one 
 Supreme Lord without a second, ending in the theory of 
 illusion (Vivarta). These Munis cannot be in error, con- 
 sidering that they are omniscient; and these different 
 views have only been propounded by them, in order to 
 keep off all nihilistic theories, and because they were afraid 
 that human beings, with their inclinations towards the 
 objects of the world, could not be expe'cted at once to know 
 the true goal of man. But all comes right when we 
 understand that men, from not understanding their true 
 object, imagined that these Munis would have propounded 
 what is contrary to the Veda, and thus, accepting their 
 opinions, have become followers of various paths/ 
 
 Much of what has here been translated from Madhu- 
 sftdana's Prasthana-bheda, though it gives, a general survey, 
 is obscure, but will become more intelligible hereafter when 
 we come to examine each of the six philosophies by itself ; 
 nor is it at all certain that his view of the development of 
 Indian philosophy is historically tenable. But it shows at 
 all events a certain freedom of thought, which we see now 
 and then in other writers also, such as Vi<7/7ana-bhikshu, 
 who are bent on showing that there is behind the diversity 
 of Vedanta, Sa/mkhya, and Nyaya one and the same truth, 
 though differently expressed; that philosophies, in fact, 
 may be many, but truth is one. 
 
PRASTHANA BHEDA. 83 
 
 But however we may admire this insight on the part of 
 Madhusudana and others, it is our duty, as historians of 
 philosophy, to study the different paths by which different 
 philosophers, whether by the light of revelation or by thaty 
 of their own unfettered reason, have striven to discover 
 the trr.th. It is the very multiplicity and variety of these 
 paths that form the chief interest of the history of philo- 
 sophy, and the fact that to the present day these six 
 different systems of philosophy have held their own in the 
 midst of a great multitude of philosophic theories, pro- 
 pounded by the thinkers of India, shows that we must 
 first of all try to appreciate their characteristic peculiarities, 
 before attempting with Madhusudana to eliminate their 
 distinctive features. 
 
 These philosophers are 
 
 1. Badarayana, called also Vyasa Dvaipayana orKrislma 
 Dvaipayana, the reputed author of the Brahma-Sutras, 
 called also Uttara-Mimamsa-Sutras, or V/asa-Sutras. 
 
 2. (jaimini, the author of the PCirva-Mim&msa-Sutras. 
 
 3. Kapila, the author of the Samkhya-Sutras. 
 
 4. Pata/7(T/ali, also called $esha or PhaTiin, the autlior of 
 the Yoga-Sutras. 
 
 5. Kanada, also called Kanabhu#, Karcabhakshaka, or 
 Ult A ika, the author of the Vaiseshika-Sutras. 
 
 6. Gotama, also called Akshapada, the author of the 
 Nyaya-Sutras. 
 
 It is easy to see that the philosophers to whom our 
 Sutras are ascribed, cannot be considered as the first 
 originators of Indian philosophy. These Sutras often 
 refer to other philosophers, who therefore must have 
 existed before the time when the Sfttras received their 
 final form. Nor could the fact that c ome of the Sutras 
 quote and refute the opinions of other Sfttras, be accounted 
 for without admitting a growing up of different philo- 
 sophical schools side by side during a period which pre- 
 ceded their last arrangement. Unfortunately such refer 
 ences hardly ever give us the title of a book, or its author, 
 still less the ipsissima verba. When they refer to such 
 topics as Purusha and Prakriti we know that they refer 
 to the S&mkhya, if they speak of A?ius or atoms, we know 
 
 a 2 
 
84 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 that their remarks are pointed at the Vaiseshikas. But it 
 by no means follows that they refer to the Samkhya or 
 Vaiseshika-Sfttras exactly as we now possess them. Some 
 of these, as has been proved, are so modern that they could 
 not possibly be quoted by ancient philosophers. Our 
 S&mkhya-Sfttras, for instance, have been proved by 
 Dr. F. Hall to be not earlier than about 1380 A. D., and 
 they may be even later. Startling as this discovery was, 
 there is certainly nothing to be said against the arguments 
 of Dr. Hall or against those by which Professor Garbe l has 
 supported Dr. Hall's discovery. In this case, therefore, 
 these Sutras should be looked upon as a mere rifaccimento, 
 to take, the place of earlier S&tras, which as early as the 
 sixth cent. A.D. had probably been already superseded by 
 the popular S&mkhya-k&rik&s and then forgotten. This 
 late date of our Samkhya-Sutras may seem incredible, but 
 though I still hold that the Sutra-style arose in a period 
 when writing for literary purposes was still in its tentative 
 stage, we know that even in our time there are learned 
 Pandits who find no difficulty in imitating this ancient 
 Sutra-style. The Sutra-period, reaching down as far as 
 Asoka's reign in the third century, and his Council in 
 243 B.C., .claims not only the famous Sutras of P&Tiini, but 
 has also been fixed upon as the period of the greatest 
 philosophical activity in India, an activity called forth, it 
 would seem, by the strong commotion roused by the rise 
 of the Buddhist school of philosophy, and afterwards of 
 religion. 
 
 Literary References in the Upanlshads. 
 
 It is of considerable importance to remember that of the 
 technical names of the six systems of philosophy, two only 
 occur in the classical Upanishads, namely Samkhya and Yoga 
 or S&wkhya-yoga. Vedanta does not occur, except in the 
 $vet&8vatara, MumZaka and some of the later Upanishads 2 . 
 Mima;m8& occurs in the general sense of investigation, Nyaya 
 
 1 Garbe, Die Sawkhya-Philosophie, p. 71. 
 
 8 A curious distinction is made in a commentary on the Gautama- 
 Sutras XIX, 12, where it is said that ' those parts of the Aranyakas which 
 ar* not Upanishads are called Vedantas.' 
 
THE SIX SYSTEMS OP PHILOSOPHY. 85 
 
 and Vaiseshika are altogether absent, nor do we meet with 
 such words as Hetuvidya, or Anvikshiki, nor with the 
 names of the reputed founders of the six systems, except 
 those of the two Mimamsas, Badaraya?ia and ffaimini. The 
 names of Pata/tyali, or Ka^ada, are absent altogether, while 
 the names of Kapila and Gotarna, when they occur, refer, 
 it would seem, to quite different personalities, 
 
 The Six Systems of Philosophy. 
 
 No one can suppose that those whose names are men- 
 tioned as the authors of these six philosophical systems, 
 were more than the final editors or redactors of the Sutras 
 as we now possess them. If the third century B.C. should 
 seem too late a date for the introduction of writing for 
 literary purposes in India, we should remember that even 
 inscriptions have not yet been found more ancient than 
 those of Asoka, and there is a wide difference between 
 inscriptions and literary compositions. The Southern 
 Buddhists do not claim to have reduced their Sacred Canon 
 to writing before the first century B.C., though it is well 
 known that they kept up close relations with their 
 Northern co-religionists who were acquainted with writ- 
 ing 1 . During all that time, therefore, between 477 and 
 77 B.C., ever so many theories of the world, partaking of 
 a Vedanta, Sa??ikhya or Yoga, nay even of a Buddhist 
 character, could have sprung A up and have been reduced to 
 a mnemonic form in various Asramas. We need not wonder 
 that much of that literature, considering that it could be 
 mnemonic only, should have been irretrievably lost, and 
 we must take care also not to look upon what has been 
 left to us in the old Darcanas, as representing the whole 
 outcome of the philosophical activity of the whole of 
 India through so many generations. All we can say is 
 that philosophy began to ferment in India during the 
 period filled by Branmittas and Upanishads, nay even in 
 some of the Vedic hymns, that the existence of Upanishads, 
 though not necessarily our own, is recognised in the Bud- 
 dhist Canon, and lastly that the name of Suttas, as a 
 
 1 The snered Bo-tree in. the city of Anuradhapura in Ceylon was grown, 
 we are told, from a branch of the tree at Buddha Gaya. 
 
86 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 component part of the Buddhist Canon, must be later than 
 that of the earliest Brahmanic Sutras, because in the mean- 
 time the ' meaning of the word had been changed from 
 short mnemonic sentences to fully developed discourses. 
 Possibly Sutra was originally meant for the text to be 
 elucidated in a sermon, so that the long Buddhistic sermons 
 came to be called Suttas in consequence. 
 
 Brihaspati-S&tras. 
 
 That some of the earlier philosophical Sutras were lost, 
 is shown in* the case of the Brihaspati-Sutras. These are 
 said to have contained the doctrines of the out and out 
 materialists, or sensualists, the Laukayatikas or 7farvakas, 
 who deny the existence of everything beyond what is 
 given by the senses. They are referred to by Bhaskara- 
 Hrya at Brahma-Sutras III, 3, 53 *, and as he gives an 
 extract, it is likely that they still existed in his time, 
 though no MS. of them has been found as yet in India. 
 The same applies to such Sutras as the Vaikhanasa-Sutras, 
 possibly intended for the Yanaprasthas, and the Bhikshu- 
 Sutras-, quoted by PaTiini, IV, 3, no, and intended, it 
 would seem, for Brahmanic, and not yet for Buddhistic 
 mendicants. It is a sad truth which we have to learn 
 more and more, that of the old pre-Buddhistic literature 
 we have but scanty fragments, and that even these may 
 be, in some cases, mere reproductions of lost originals, as in 
 the case of the Samkhya- Sutras. We know now that such 
 Sutras could have been produced at any time, and we 
 should not forget that even at present, in the general decay 
 of Sanskrit scholarship, India still possesses scholars who 
 can imitate K&lidasa, to say nothing of such poems as the 
 Mahabharata and Ramayana, and so successfully that few 
 scholars could tell the difference. It is not long ago that 
 I received a Sanskrit treatise written in Sutras with a com- 
 mentary, the work of a living scholar in India, which 
 might have deceived many a European scholar of Sanskrit 
 
 1 Colebrooke^ Misc. Essays*, I, 429. 
 
 3 They were identified by T&r&n&tha Tarkav&tospati with the Vedanta- 
 Sutras ; see Siddhanta KaumudS, vol. i, p. 593. 
 
BOOKS OF REFERENCE. 87 
 
 literature \ If that is possible now, if, as in the case ot 
 the Kapila-Sutras, it was possible in the fourteenth cen- 
 tury, why should not the same have taken place during 
 the period of the Renaissance in India, nay even "at an 
 earlier time ? At all events, though grateful for what has 
 been preserved, and preserved in what may seem to us 
 an almost miraculous manner, we should not imagine that 
 we possess all, or that we possess what we possess in its 
 original form. 
 
 Books of Reference. 
 
 I shall mention here some of the most important works 
 only, from which students of philosophy, particularly those 
 ignorant of Sanskrit, may gain by themselves a knowledge 
 of the six recognised systems of Indian Philosophy. The 
 titles of the more important of the original Sanskrit texts 
 may be found in Colebrooke's Miscellaneous Essays, vol. ii, 
 p. 239 seq., and in the Catalogues, published since his time, 
 of the various collections of Sanskrit MSS. in Europe and 
 India. - 
 
 For the Vedanta-philosophy of Badaraya^a the most 
 useful book is Thibaut.'s English translation of the text of 
 the Sutras and $arakara's commentary in the S. B. E., vols. 
 xxxiv and xxxviii. 
 
 Of books written in German, Deussen's translation of the 
 same work, 1887, preceded as it was by his 'System des 
 Vedanta/ 1883, can be thoroughly recommended. 
 
 Of the Samkhya-system we have the Sutras translated 
 by Ballantyne in 1882-1885, the Aphorisms of the Samkhya 
 Philosophy of Kapila, with illustrative extracts from the 
 Commentaries, 1852, 1865, 1885. 
 
 In German we have the Samkhya-Prava&ana-Bhashya, 
 Vi</>7ana-bhikshu's Commentar zu den Samkhya-Sutras, 
 ubersstzt von R. Garbe, 1889. Also Aniruddha's Com- 
 mentary and the original parts of Vedantin Mahadeva's 
 commentary on the S&wkhya-Sutras, by Richard Garbe, 
 J 892. 
 
 1 It is called KatantraArfcfcandaftprakriya by JTandrakanta Tarkalankara, 
 1896, and gives additional Sutras to the Katantra on Vedic Grammar. 
 He makes no secret that Sutraw vnttis A-obhayam api mayaiva vyara# 
 ' the Sutra and the commentary, both were composed by me.' 
 
88- INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Der Mondschein der Samkhya Wahrheit, Va/raspatimi^ra's 
 Samkhya- tattva-kauinudi, iibersetzt von R. Garbe, 1892, is 
 also a very useful work. 
 
 The S&mkhya Karika by f swarakrishna, translated from 
 the Sanscrit by H. T. Colebrooke, also the Bhashya or com- 
 mentary by Gaurapada; translated and illustrated by an 
 original comment by H. H. Wilson, Oxford, 1837, may still 
 be consulted with advantage. 
 
 Other useful works are : 
 
 John Davies, Hindu Philosophy. The Sankhya Karika 
 of IswarakVishna, London, 1881. 
 
 Die Samkhya-Philosophie, nach den Quellen, von R. Garbe, 
 1894. 
 
 Of the Purva-Mimamsa or simply Mtmamsa, which deals 
 chiefly with the nature and authority of the Veda with 
 special reference to sacrificial and other duties, we have 
 the Sfttras with /Sabarasvamin's commentary published in 
 the original; but there is as yet no book in English in 
 which that system may be studied, except Professor Thi- 
 baut's translation of Laugakshi Bhaskara's Arthasamgraha, 
 a short abstract of that philosophy, published in the Benares 
 Sanskrit Series, No. 4. 
 
 The Vaiseshika system of philosophy may be studied in 
 an English translation of its S&tras by A. E. Gough, 
 Benares, 1873 ; also in a German translation by Roer, 
 Zeitschriffc der Deutschen Morgenlandischen Gesellschaft, 
 vols. 21 and 22, and in some articles of mine in the same 
 Journal of the German Oriental Society, 1849. 
 
 The Nyaya-Sfttras of Gotama have been translated, with 
 the exception of the last book, by Ballantyne, Allahabad, 
 1850-57. 
 
 The Yoga-Sfttras are accessible in an English translation 
 by Rajendralala Mitra, in the Bibiiotheca Indica, Nos. 462, 
 478, 482, 491, and 492. 
 
 Dates of the Philosophical Sfctras. 
 
 If we consider the state of philosophical thought in India 
 such as it is represented to us in the Brahmawas and 
 Upanishads, and afterwards in the canonical books of the 
 Buddhists, we cannot wonder that all attempts at fixing 
 
DATES OP THE PHILOSOPHICAL SttTEAS. 89 
 
 the dates of the six recognised systems of philosophy, nay 
 even their mutual relationship, should hitherto have failed. 
 It is true that Buddhism and ffainism were likewise but 
 two philosophical systems out of many, and that it has 
 been possible to fix" their dates. But if in their case we 
 know something about their dates and their historical 
 development, this is chiefly due to the social and political 
 importance which they acquired during the fifth, the 
 fourth, and the third centuries B. o., and not simply to their 
 philosophical tenets. We know also that there were many 
 teachers, contemporaries of Buddha, but they have left no 
 traces in the literary history of India. 
 
 Nor should we forget that, though the date of the 
 Buddhist Canon may be fixed, the date of many of the 
 texts which we now possess and accept as canonical is by 
 no means beyond the reach of doubt. 
 
 In the Buddhist annals themselves other teachers such 
 as (?tfatiputra, the Nirgrantha, the founder of Gainism, 
 Pftrana Kasyapa, Kakuda KMyayana, A#ita Kesakambali, 
 Sam^aya Vaira^i-putra. Gosali-putra, the Maskarin, are 
 mentioned by the side of Gautama, the prince of the clan 
 of the S&kyas. One of these only became known in his- 
 tory, (?/?atiputra, the Nirgrantha or gymnosophist, because 
 the society founded by him, like the brotherhood founded 
 by Buddha, developed into a powerful sect, the Gain as. 
 Another, Gosali with the bamboo stick, originally an Agi- 
 vaka, then a follower of Mahavira, became likewise the 
 founder of a sect of his own, which, however, has now 
 disappeared 1 . Cr/iatiputra or Nataputta was actually the 
 senior of Buddha. 
 
 Though it seems likely that the founders of the six 
 systems of philosophy, though not the authors of the 
 Sfttras which we possess, belonged to the same period of 
 philosophical and religious fermentation which gave rise to 
 the first spreading of Buddha's doctrines in India, it is by 
 no means clear that any of these systems, in their literary 
 form, are presupposed by Buddhism. This is owing to the 
 vagueness of the quotations which are hardly ever given 
 
 1 Kern, Buddhismus, I, p. 182. 
 
90 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 verbatim. In India, during the mnemonic period of litera- 
 ture, the contents of a book may have become considerably 
 modified, while the title remained the same. Even at a 
 much later time, when we see Bhartrihari (died 650 A.D.) 
 referring to the Mimamsaka, Samkhya, and Vaiseshika 
 Darsanas, we have no right to* conclude that he knew these 
 Darsanas exactly as we know them, though he may well 
 have known these philosophies after they had assumed 
 their systematic form. Again, when he quotes Naiyayikas, 
 it by no means follows that he knew our Gotama-Sfttras, 
 nor have we any right to say that our Gotama-Sutras 
 existed in his time. It is possible, it is probable, but it is 
 not certain. We must therefore be very careful not to rely 
 too much on quotations from, or rather allusions to, other 
 systems of philosophy. 
 
 The S&mkhya-Stitras, as we possess them, arc very chary 
 of references. They clearly refer to Vaiieshika and Nyaya, 
 when they examine the six categories of the former (V, 85) 
 and the sixteen Padarthas of the latter (V, 86). Whenever 
 they refer to the Anus or atoms, we know that they have 
 the Vaiseshika-philosophy in their minds; and once the 
 Vaiseshikas are actually mentioned by name (I, 35). Sruti, 
 which the Samkhyas were supposed to disregard, is very 
 frequently appealed to/Smrtti once (V, 123), and Vama- 
 deva, whose name occurs in both $ruti and Smriti, is 
 mentioned as one who had obtained spiritual freedom. 
 But of A individual philosophers we meet only with Sanan- 
 dana AMrya (VI, 69^ and Patffoudkha (V, 32; VI, 68), 
 while the teachers, the A&aryas, when mentioned in general, 
 are explained as comprehending Eapila himself, as well as 
 others. 
 
 Ved&nta-Sfttras. 
 
 The Vedanta-Sutras contain more frequent references, 
 but they too do not help us much for chronological purposes. 
 
 Badarayana refers more or less clearly to the Buddhists, 
 the (?airia,s, Pasupatas, and Pa//Jtaratras, all of whom he is 
 endeavouring to refute. He never refers, however, to any 
 
VEDANTA-SUTRAS. 9 1 
 
 literary work, and even when he refers to other philo- 
 sophical systems, he seems to avoid almost intentionally 
 the recognised names of their authors, nay even their tech- 
 nical terms. Still it is clear that the systems of the Purva- 
 Mimamsa, the Yoga, Samkhya, and Vai-seshika were in his 
 mind when he composed his Sutras, and among Mimamsic 
 authorities he refers by name to Gaimini, Badari, Audulomi, 
 A&marathya, Kasakritsna, Karsh^a^ini, and Atreya, nay 
 to a BadarayaTia also. We cannot be far wrong therefore 
 if we assign the gradual formation of the six systems of 
 philosophy to the period from Buddha (fifth century) to 
 Asoka (third century), though we have to admit, particu- 
 larly in the cases of Vedanta, S&mkhya, and Yoga a long 
 previous development reaching back through Upanishads 
 and BrahmaTias to the very hymns of the Big-veda. 
 
 It is equally difficult to fix the relative position l of the 
 great systems of philosophy, because, as I explained before, 
 they quote each other mutually. With regard to the rela- 
 tion of Buddhism to the six orthodox systems it seems to* 
 me that all we can honestly say is that schools of philosophy 
 handing down doctrines very similar to those of our six 
 classical or orthodox systems, are presupposed by the 
 Buddhist Suttas. But this is very different from the 
 opinion held by certain scholars that Buddha or his disciples 
 actually borrowed from our Sfttras. We know nothing of 
 Smkhya-literature before the Samkhya-karikas, which 
 belong to the sixth century after Christ. Even if we 
 admit that the Tattva-samasa was an earlier work, how 
 could We, without parallel dates, prove any actual borrow- 
 ing on the part of Buddha or his disciples at that early 
 time? 
 
 In the Upanishads and BrahmaTias, though there is a 
 common note running through them all, there is as yet 
 great latitude and want of system, and a variety of opi- 
 nions supported by different teachers and different schools. 
 Even in the hymns we meet with great independence and 
 individuality of thought, which occasional!^ seems to 
 amount to downright scepticism and atheism. 
 
 1 Bhandarkar, Samkhya Philosophy (1871), p. 3. 
 
92 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 We must keep all this in mind if we wish to gain 
 a correct idea of the historical origin and growth of what 
 we are accustomed to call the six philosophical systems of 
 India. We have seen already that philosophical discussions 
 were not confined to the Brahmans, but that the Kshatriyas 
 also took a very active and prominent part in the elabora- 
 tion of such fundamental^ philosophical concepts as that of 
 Atman or Self. 
 
 It is out of this floating mass of philosophical and 
 religious opinion, which was common property in India, 
 that the regular systems slowly emerged. Though we do 
 not know in what form this took place, it is quite clear 
 that what we now possess of philosophical manuals, in the 
 form of Sfttras, could not have been -written down during 
 the time when writing for any practical purposes except 
 inscriptions on monuments and coins was still unknown in 
 India, or at all events had not yet been employed for 
 literary purposes, so far as we know. 
 
 Mnemonic Literature. 
 
 It has now been generally admitted, I believe, that 
 whenever writing has once become popular, it is next to 
 impossible that there should be no allusion to it in the 
 poetical or prose compositions of the people. Even as late 
 as the time of $amkara, the written letters are still called 
 unreal (Anrita) in comparison with the audible sounds, as 
 classified in the Pratisakhyas, which are represented by 
 them (Ved. Sutras II, i, 14, p. 451). There is no allusion 
 to writing in the hymns, the Brahman as and Upanishads ; 
 very few, if any, in the Sfitras. The historical value of 
 these allusions to writing which occur in the literature of 
 the Buddhists depends, of course, on the date which we can 
 assign, not to the original authors, but to the writers of 
 our texts. We must never forget that there was in India 
 during many centuries a purely mnemonic literature, which 
 continued down to the Siitra-period, and which was handed 
 down from generation to generation according to a system 
 which is fully described in the Pratisakhyas. What would 
 have been the use of that elaborate system, if there had 
 been manuscripts in existence at the same time ? 
 
MNEMONIC LITERATURE. 93 
 
 When that mnemonic literature, that Smriti, came for 
 the first time to be reduced to writing, this probably took 
 place in something like the form of Sutras. The very 
 helplessness of the Sutra-style would thus become intel- 
 ligible. Letters at that time were as yet monumental 
 only, for in India also monumental writing is anterior to 
 literary writing, and to the adoption of a cursive alphabet. 
 Writing material was scarce in India, and the number of 
 those who could read must have been very small. At the 
 same time there existed the old mnemonic literature, 
 invested with a. kind of sacred character, part and parcel 
 of the ancient system of education, which had so far 
 answered all purposes and was not easy to supplant. 
 Much of that mnemonic literature has naturally been lost, 
 unless it was reduced to writing at the proper time. Often 
 the name may have survived, while tne body of a work 
 was entirely changed. Hence when we see the Samkhya 
 mentioned by name in the Buddhist texts, such as the 
 Visuddhi-m$gga (chap. XVII), it is impossible to tell 
 whether even at that time there existed a work on the 
 Sarakhya-philosophy in the form of Sutras. It is clear at 
 all events that it could not have been our Samkhya-Sutras, 
 nor even the Samkhya-karikas which seem to have super- 
 seded the ancient Sutras early in the sixth century, while 
 our present Sfttras date from the fourteenth. 
 
 It might be possible, if not to prove, at all events to 
 render probable the position assigned here to Buddha's 
 teaching as subsequent to the early growth of philosophical 
 ideas in their systematic and more or less technical form, 
 by a reference to the name assigned to his mother, whether 
 it was her real name or a name assigned to her by tradi- 
 tion. She was called Maya or Mayadevi. Considering 
 that in Buddha's eyes the world was Maya or illusion, it 
 seems more likely that the name was given to his mother 
 by early tradition, and that it was given not without 
 a purpose. And if so this could only have been after the 
 name of Avidya (nescience) in the Vednta, and of Prakriti 
 in the Samkhya-philosophy had been replaced by the tech- 
 nical term of Maya. It is well known that, in the old 
 classical Upanishads, the name of Maya never occurs ; and 
 
94 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 it is equally significant that it does occur in the later and 
 more or less apocryphal Upanishads. In the $vetasvatara, 
 for instance, I, 10, we read, Mayam tu Prakritim vidyat, 
 ' Let him know that Prakriti is Maya or Maya Prakriti/ 
 This refers, it would seem, to the Samkhya system in 
 which Prakriti acts the part of J'JA.ya and fascinates the 
 Purusha, till he turns away from her and she ceases to 
 exist, at all events as far as he is concerned. But whether 
 in Samkhya .or Vedanta, M&ya .in its technical meaning 
 belongs certainly to a secondary period, and it might there- 
 fore be argued that Maya, as the name of Buddha's mother, 
 is not likely to have found a place in the Buddhistic legend 
 during the early period of Indian philosophy, as repre- 
 sented in the early Upanishads, and even in the SMras o 
 these two prominent schools. 
 
 There was, no doubt, a certain amount of philosophical 
 mnemonic composition after the period represented by the 
 old Upanishads, and before the systematic arrangement of 
 the philosophical Sutras, but whatever may have existed 
 in it, is for ever lost to us. We can see this clearly in the 
 case of" the Brihaspati-philosophy. 
 
 The Bn'liaspati-Fhilosophy. 
 
 Brihaspati is no doubt a very perplexing character. His 
 name is given as that of the author of two Vedic hymns, 
 X, 7i, A X, 72, a distinction being made between a Brihas- 
 pati Angirasa and a Brihaspati Laukya (Lauk&yatika ?). 
 His name is well known also as one of the Vedic deities. 
 In Rv. VIII, 96, 15, we read that Indra, with Brihaspati 
 as his ally, overcame the godless people (adevi/i, vis&h). He 
 is afterwards quoted as the author of a law-book, decidedly 
 modern, which we still possess. Brihaspati is besides the 
 name of the planet Jupiter, and of the preceptor or Purohita 
 of the gods, so that Brihaspati-purohita has become a recog- 
 nised name of Indra, as having Brihaspati for his Burohita 
 or chief priest and helper. It seems strange, therefore, 
 that the same name, that of the preceptor of the gods, 
 should have been chosen as the name of the representative 
 of the most unorthodox, atheistical, and sensualistic system 
 of philosophy in India. We may possibly account for this 
 
THE B/?/HASPATI-PHILOSOPin 95 
 
 by referring to the Brahmar<as and Upanishads, in which 
 B?*ihaspati is represented as teaching the demons his per- 
 nicious doctrines, not for their benefit, but for their own 
 destruction. Thus we read, MaitrayaTia Up. 7, 9 : 
 
 ' Brzhaspati, having become or having assumed the shape 
 of $ukra, brought forth that false knowledge, for the safety 
 of Indra and for the destruction of the Asuras (demons). 
 By it they show that good is evil and that evil is good, 
 and they say that this new law, which upsets the Veda 
 and the other sacred books, should be studied (by the 
 Asuras, the demons). That being so, it is said, Let no man 
 (but the demons only) study that false knowledge, for it is 
 wrong ; it is, as it were, barren. Its reward lasts only as 
 long as the pleasure lasts, as with one who has fallen 
 from his station (caste). Let that false doctrine not be 
 attempted, for thus it is said * : 
 
 1. Widely divergent and opposed are these two, the one 
 known as false knowledge, the other as knowledge. I 
 (Yama) believe Na/dketas to be possessed of a desire for 
 knowledge ; even many pleasures do not tempt him away. 
 
 2. He who knows at the same time both the imperfect 
 knowledge (of ritual) and the perfect knowledge (of Self), 
 crosses death by means of the imperfect, and obtains, im- 
 mortality by means of the perfect knowledge 2 . 
 
 3. Those who are wrapt up in imperfect knowledge 
 fancy themselves alone wise and learned, they wander 
 about floundering and deceived, like the blind led by a man 
 who is himself blind V 
 
 And again : 
 
 'The gods and the demons, wishing to know the Self, 
 went once into the presence of Brahman (their father 
 Pra^apati 4 ). Having bowed 'before him, they said : " O 
 blessed one, we wish to know the Self, do thou tell us ! " 
 Thus, after considering, he thought, these demons believe 
 in a difference of the Atman (from themselves), and there- 
 fore a very different Self was taught to them. On- that 
 Self these deluded demons take their stand, clinging to it, 
 destroying the true boat of salvation, and praising untruth, 
 
 Upanishiid II, 4. 2 Va</. Up. II. 
 
 3 Kato. Up. II, 5. * TfMnd. Up. VIII, 8. 
 
96 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 What is untrue they see as true, like jugglery. But in 
 reality, what is said in the Vedas, that is true. What is 
 said in the Vedas, on that the wise take their stand. 
 Therefore let no Brahman study what is not in the Vedas, 
 or this will be the result (as in the case of the demons)/ 
 
 This passage is curious in several respects. First of all 
 it is a clear reference of one Upanishad to another, namely 
 to the K Aandogya, in which this episode of Br/haspati 
 giving false instruction to the demons is more fully de- 
 tailed. Secondly we see an alteration which was evidently 
 made intentionally. In the A^Aandogya Upanishad it is 
 Pra^apati himself who imparts false knowledge of the 
 Atman to the Asuras, while in the Maitrya7ia Upanishad 
 Brihaspati takes his place. It is not unlikely that Brihas- 
 pati was introduced in the later Upanishad in order to 
 take the place of Pra^apati, because it was felt to be 
 wrong that this highest deity should ever have misled 
 anybody, even the demons. In the -fiTMndogya the demons 
 who believed in the Anyata (otherness) of the Atman, that 
 is to say, in the possibility that the Atman could be in 
 some place different from themselves, were told to look 
 for it in the person seen in the pupil of the eye, or in the 
 image in a looking-glass, or in the shadow in the water. 
 All this would, however, refer to a visible body only. 
 Then Pra#&pati goes on to say that the Atman is what 
 moves about full of pleasures in a dream, and as this 
 would still be the individual man, he declares at last that 
 Atman is what remains in deep sleep, without however 
 losing its own identity. 
 
 If then in the Upanishads already Brihaspati was intro- 
 duced for the purpose of teaching wrong and unorthodox 
 opinions, we may possibly be able to understand how his 
 name came to cling to sensualistic opinions, and how at 
 last, however unfairly, he was held responsible for them. 
 That such opinions existed even at an earlier time, we 
 can see in some of the hymns in which many years ago 
 I pointed out these curious traces of an incipient scepticism. 
 In later Sanskrit, a Barhaspatya, or a follower of Brihas- 
 pati, has come to mean an infidel in general. Among the 
 works mentioned in the Lalita-vistara as studied by Buddha 
 
THE B/?/HASPATI-PHILOSOPHY 97 
 
 a Brhaspatyam is mentioned, but whether composed in 
 Sfttras or in metre does not appear. Besides, it is well 
 known that the Lalita-vistara is rather a broken reed to 
 rest upon for chronological purposes. If we may trust> 
 however, to a scholion of Bhuaskara on the Brahma-Sfltras, 
 he seems to have known, even at that late time, some 
 Sutras ascribed to Brihaspati 1 , in which the doctrines 
 of the J&Tarvakas, i. e, unbelievers, were contained. But 
 although such Sfttras may have existed, we have no means 
 of fixing their date as either anterior or posterior to the 
 other philosophic Sfttras. Panini knew of Sfttras which 
 are lost to us, and some of them may be safely referred 
 to the time of Buddha. He also in quoting Bhikshu-Sfttras 
 and Natfa-Sutras, mentions (IV, 3, no) the author of the 
 former as P&ra^arya, of the latter as illin. As P&ra- 
 saryc. is a name of Vy&sa, the son of ParlUara, it has been 
 supposed that Panini meant by Bhikshu-Sfttras, the. 
 Brahma-Sfttras 2 , sometimes ascribed to Vyasa, which we 
 still possess. That would fix their date about the fifth 
 century B.C., and has been readily accepted therefore by 
 all who wish to claim the greatest possible antiquity for 
 the philosophical literature of India. But Parasarya would 
 hardly have been chosen as the titular name of Vyasa ; 
 and though we should not hesitate to assign to the doc- 
 trines of the Vedanta a place in the fifth century B.C., nay 
 even earlier, we cannot on such slender authority do the 
 same for the Sutras themselves. 
 
 When we meet elsewhere with the heterodox doctrines 
 of Brihaspati, they are expressed in verse, as if taken from 
 a Karika rather than from Sfttras. They possess a peculiar _ 
 interest to us, because they would show us that India, 
 which is generally considered as the home of all that is 
 most spiritual and idealistic, was by no means devoid of 
 sensur l ; stic philosophers. But thouglTit is difficult to say 
 how old such theories may have been in India it is certain 
 that, as soon as we get any coherent treatises on philosophy, 
 sensuajfetic opinions crop up among them. 
 
 Of course the doctrines of Buddha would be called 
 sceptical and atheistic by the Brahmans, and .ffarvaka as 
 1 Colebrooke, II, 429. a See before, p. 86, 
 
 7 H 
 
98 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 well as Nastika are names freely applied to the Buddhists. 
 But the doctrines of Brihaspati, as far as We know them, 
 go far beyond Buddhism, and .nay be said to be hostile 
 to all religious feelings, while Buddha's teaching was both 
 religious and philosophical, though the lines that separate 
 philosophy and religion in India are very faint. 
 
 There are some tenets of the followers of Brihaspati 
 which seem to indicate the existence of other schools of 
 philosophy, by their side. The Barhaspatyas speak as 
 if being inter pares, they differ from others as others 
 differed from them, Traces of an opposition against the 
 religion of the Vedas (Kautsa) appear in the hymns, the 
 Brahman as, and the Sutras, and .to ignore them would give 
 us an entirely false idea of the religious and philosophical 
 battles and battle-fields of ancient India. As viewed from 
 a Brahmanic point of view, and we have no other, the 
 opposition represented by Brihaspati and others may seein 
 insignificant, but the very name given to these heretics 
 would seem to imply that their doctrines had met with 
 a world-wide acceptance (Lokayatikas). Another name, 
 that of Nastika, is given to them as saying No to every- 
 thing except the evidence of the senses, particularly to the 
 evidence of the Vedas, which, yunonsly enough, was called 
 by the Vedantists Pratyaksha, that is, self-evident, like 
 sense-perception. 
 
 These Nastikas, a name not applicable to mere dissenters, 
 but to out and out nihilists only, ai.*e interesting to us from 
 a historical point of view, because in arguing against other 
 philosophies, they prove, ipso facto, the e'xistence of ortho- 
 dox philosophical systems before their time. The recog- 
 nised schools of Indian philosophy could tolerate much; 
 they were tolerant, as we shall see, even towards a qualified 
 atheism, like that of the Sarakhya. But they had nothing 
 but hatred and contempt for the Nastikas, and it is for 
 that very reason, and on account of the strong feelings 
 of aversion which they excited, that it seemed to me right 
 that their philosophy should not be entirely passed 'Vet 
 by the side of the six Vedic or orthodox systems. 
 
 Madhava, in his Sarvadarsana-samgraha or the Epitome 
 of all philosophical systems, begins with an account of the 
 
THE B#/HASPATI-PHILOSOPHY. 99 
 
 Nastika or jKarvaka system. He looks npon it as the 
 lowest of all, hut nevertheless, as not to be ignored in 
 a catalogue .of the philosophical forces of India. /&rvka 
 (not Jfarvaka) is given as the name of a B&kshasa, and 
 he is treated as a historical individual to whom Brihas- 
 pati or Va/caspati delivered his doctrines. The name of 
 ATarv&ka is clearly connected with that of K lirva, and this 
 is given as a synonym of Buddha by B&las&strin in the 
 Preface to his edition of the K&ak& (p. a). He is repre- 
 sented as a teacher of the Lokayata or world- wide system, 
 if that is the meaning originally intended by that word. 
 A short account of this system is given in the Prabodha- 
 fcandrodaya 27, 18, in the following words: 'The Lokayata 
 system in which the senses alone form an authority, in 
 which the elements are earth, water, fire, and wind (not 
 Akasa or ether), in which wealth and enjoyment form the 
 ideals of man, in which the elements think, the other world 
 is denied, and death is the end of all things/ This name 
 Lokayata occurs already in Pa/raini's GaTia TJkthMi. It 
 should be noted however, that Hema/candra distinguishes 
 between Barhaspatya or Nastika, and If&rvaka or Lokfe- 
 yatika, though he does not tell us which he considers the 
 exact points on which th$ two are supposed to have 
 differed. The Buddhists use Lok&yata for philosophy in 
 general. The statement that the Lokayatas admitted but 
 one Pram&na, i. e. authority of knowledge, namely sensuous 
 perception, shows clearly that there must have been other 
 philosophical systems already in existence. We shall see 
 that the Vaiseshika acknowledged two, perception (Prat- 
 yaksha) and inference (Arminana); the S&nikhya three, 
 adding trustworthy affirmation (Aptavakya); the Nyaya 
 four, adding comparison lUpamana) ; the two Mim&wsils 
 six, adding presumption (Arthapatti) and privation (AbhU- 
 va). Of these and others we shall have to speak here- 
 after. Even what seems to us so natural an idea as that 
 of the four or five elements, required some time to develop, 
 as we see in the history of the Greek arotxcta, and yet such 
 an idea was evidently quite familiar to the jfif&rvakas. 
 While other systems admitted five, i.e. earth, water, fire, 
 air, and ether, they admitted four only, excluding ether, 
 
 H 2 
 
1OO . INDIAN PHILOSOPHY, 
 
 probably because it was invisible. In the Upanishads we 
 see traces of an even earlier triad of elements. All this 
 shows the philosophical activity of the Hindus from the 
 earnest times, and exhibits to us the K &rv&kas as denying 
 ratlier what had been more or less settled before their time, 
 than as adding any new ideas of their own. 
 
 So it is again with regard to the soul. Not only philo- 
 sophrs, but every Arya in India had a word for soul, and 
 never doubted that there was something in man different 
 from the visible body. The If&rv&kas only denied this. 
 They held that what was called soul was not a thing by 
 itself, but was simply the body over again. They held 
 that itr was the body that felt, that saw and heard, that 
 remembered and thought, though they saw it every day 
 rotting away and decomposing, as if it never had been. By 
 such opinions they naturally came in conflict with religion 
 even more than with philosophy. We do not know how 
 they accounted for the evolution of consciousness and in- 
 tellect out of mere flesh, except that they took refuge with 
 a simile, appealing to the intoxicating power that can be 
 developed by mixing certain ingredients, which by them- 
 selves are not intoxicating, as an analogy to the production 
 of soul from body. 
 
 Thus we read : 
 
 ' There are four elements, earth, water, fire, and air, 
 
 And from these four elements alone is intelligence pro- 
 duced 
 
 Just like the intoxicating power from Ki^wa, &c., mixed 
 together ; 
 
 Since in " I am fat," " I am lean," these attributes abide 
 in the same subject, 
 
 And since fatness, &c., resides only in the body, it alone 
 is the soul and no other, 
 
 And such ^phrases as " my body " are only significant 
 metaphorically/ 
 
 In this way the soul seems to have been to them the 
 body qualified by the attribute of intelligence, and therefore 
 supposed to perish with the body. Holding this opinion, it 
 is no wonder that they should have considered the highest 
 end of man to consist in sensual enjoyment, and that they 
 
THE Btf/HASPATI-PflILOSOMU r . IO I 
 
 should have accepted pain simply as an inevitable con- 
 comitant of pleasure. 
 
 A verse is quoted : 
 
 ' The pleasure which arises to men from contact with 
 sensible objects, 
 
 Is to be relinquished as accompanied by pain such is 
 the warning of fools ; 
 
 The berries of paddy, rich with the finest white grains, 
 
 What man, seeking his true interest, would fling them 
 away, because covered with husks and dust x ? ' 
 
 From all this we see that, though fundamental philo- 
 sophical principles are involved, the chief character of the 
 Jf&rv&ka system was practical, rather *than metaphysical, 
 teaching utilitarianism and crude hedonism in the most 
 outspoken way. It is a pity that all authoritative books 
 of these materialistic philosophers should be lost, as they 
 would probably have allowed us a deeper insight into the 
 early history of Indian philosophy than the ready-made 
 manuals of the six Darsanas on which we have chiefly to 
 rely. The following verses preserved by M&dhava in his 
 Epitome- are nearly all we possess of the teaching of 
 Brihaspati and his followers: 
 
 ' Fire is hot, water cold, and the air feels cool ; 
 
 By whom was this variety made? (we do not know), 
 therefore it must have come from their own nature 
 (Svabh&va).' 
 
 Brihaspati himself is held responsible for the following 
 invective: 
 
 'There is no paradise, no deliverance, and certainly no 
 Self in another world, 
 
 Nor are the acts of the Asramas (stations in life) or the 
 castes, productive of rewards. 
 
 The Agnihotra, the three Vedas, the three staves (carried 
 by ascetics) and smearing oneself with ashes, 
 
 They are the mode of life made by their creator a for 
 those who are devoid of sense and manliness. 
 
 1 See for these verses Cowell and Gough's translation of the Sarvadawana- 
 sa.ngraha, p. 4. 
 
 * Dhatri, creator, can here be ujed ironically only, instead of Svabhava, 
 or nature. 
 
IO2 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 If a victim slain at the GyotisWoma will go to heaven, 
 Why is not his own father killed there by the sacrificer ? 
 If the raddha-offering gives pleasure to beings that are 
 dead, 
 
 Then to give a viaticum to people who travel here on 
 earth, would be useless. 
 
 If those who are in heaven derive pleasure from offer- 
 ings, 
 
 Then why not give food here to people while they are 
 standing on the roof ? 
 
 As long .as he lives let a man live happily ; after borrow- 
 ing money, let him drink Ghee, 
 
 How can there be a return of the body after it has once 
 been reduced to ashes ? 
 
 If he who has left the body goes to another world, 
 Why does he not come back again perturbed by love of 
 his relations ? 
 
 Therefore funeral ceremonies for the dead were ordered 
 by the Brahmans. 
 
 As a means of livelihood, nothing else is known any- 
 where. 
 
 The three makers of the Vedas were buffoons, knaves, 
 and demons. 
 
 The speech of the Pandits is (unintelligible), like (?ar- 
 phari Turphari. 
 
 The obscene act there (at the horse sacrifice) to be per- 
 formed by the queen has been 
 
 Proclaimed by knaves, and likewise other things to be 
 taken in hand. 
 
 The eating of flesh was likewise ordered by demons.' 
 This is certainly very strong language, as strong as any 
 that has ever been used by ancient or modern materialists. 
 It is well that we should know how old and how widely 
 spread chis materialism was, for without it we should 
 hardly understand the efforts that were made on the other 
 side to counteract it by establishing the true sources or 
 measures of knowledge, the Prama/nas, and other funda- 
 mental truths whicli were considered essential both for 
 religion and for philosophy. The idea of orthodoxy, how- 
 ever, is very different in India from what it has been 
 
I 
 
 THE Bfl/HASPATI-PHILO&OPH*. IO3 
 
 ^Isewhere. We shall find philosophers in India who deny 
 the existence of a personal god or f svara, and who, never- 
 theless, were tolerated as orthodox as long as they recog- 
 nised the authority of the Veda, and tried to bring their 
 doctrines into harmony with Vedic texts. It is this denial 
 of the authority of the Veda which, in the eyes of the 
 Brahmans, stamped Buddha at once as a heretic, and drove 
 him to found a new religion or brotherhood, while those, 
 who followed the Sarakhya, and who on many important 
 points did not differ much from him, remained secure 
 within the pale of orthodoxy. Some of the charges 
 brought by the Barhaspatyas against the Brahmans who 
 followed the Veda are the same which the followers of 
 Buddha brought against them. Considering therefore, t ; hat 
 on the vital question of the authority of the Veda the 
 Samkhya agrees, however inconsistently, with orthodox 
 Brahmanism and differs from the Buddhists, it would be 
 far easier to prove that Buddha derived his ideas from 
 Brihaspati than from Kapila, the reputed founder of the 
 Samkhya. If we are right in the description we have 
 given of the. unrestrained and abundant growth of philo- 
 sophical ideas in ancient India, the idea of borrowing, so 
 natural to us, seems altogether out of place in India. 
 A wild mass of guesses at truth was floating in the air, 
 and there was no controlling authority whatever, not even, 
 as far as we know, any binding public opinion to produce 
 anything like order in it". Hence we have as little right 
 to maintain that Buddha borrowed from Kapila as that 
 Kapila borrowed from Buddha. No one would say that 
 the Hindus borrowed the idea of building ships from the 
 Fhenieians, or that of building Stupas from the Egyptians. 
 In India we move in a world different from that which we 
 are accustomed to in Greece, Rome, or Modern Europe, and 
 we need not rush at once to the conclusion that, because 
 similar opinions prevail in Buddhism and in the Samkhya- 
 philosophy of Kapila, therefore the former must have bor- 
 rowed from the latter, or, as some hold, the latter from the 
 former. 
 
 Though we can well imagine what the spirit of the 
 philosophy of the ancient Indian heretics, wliether they 
 
104 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 are called JSTarvakas or Barhaspatyas, may have been, we 
 know, unfortunately, much less of their doctrines than of 
 any other school of philosophy. They are to us no more 
 than names, such as the names of Y&gravalkya, Raikva, or 
 any other ancient leaders of Indian thought mentioned in 
 the Upanishads, and credited there with certain utterances. 
 We know a few of the conclusions at which they arrived, 
 but of the processes by which they arrived at them we 
 know next to nothing. What we may learn from these 
 utterances is that a large mass of philosophical thought 
 must have existed in. India long before there was any 
 attempt at dividing it into six well-defined channels of 
 systematic philosophy, or reducing it to writing. Even 
 when the names of certain individuals, such as Craimini, 
 Kapila, and others, are given us as the authors of certain 
 systems of philosophy, we must not imagine that they were 
 the original creators of a philosophy in the sense in which 
 Plato and Aristotle seem to have been so. 
 
 Common Philosophical Idea*. 
 
 It cannot be urged too strongly that there existed in 
 India a large common fund of philosophical thought which, 
 like language , belonged to no one in particular, but was like 
 the air breathed by every living and thinking man. Thus 
 only can it be explained that we find a number of ideas in 
 all, or nearly all, the systems of Indian philosophy which 
 all philosophers seem to take simply for granted, and 
 which belong to no one school in particular. 
 
 1 . Metempsychosis Sams&ra. 
 
 The best known of these ideas, which belong to India 
 rather than to any individual philosopher, is that which 
 is known under the name of Metempsychosis. This is 
 a Greek word, like Metensomatosis, but without any 
 literary authority in Greek. It corresponds in meaning 
 to the Sanscrit Sams&ra, and is rendered in German by 
 Seelemvanderung. To a Hindu the idea that the souls 
 of men migrated after death into new bodies of living 
 beings, of animals, nay, even of plants, is so self-evident that 
 
IMMOKTALITV OF THE SOUL IO5 
 
 it was hardly ever questioned. We never meet with any 
 attempt at proving or disproving it among the prominent 
 writers of ancient or modern times. As early as the 
 period of the Upanishads we hear of human souls being 
 reborn both in animal and in vegetable bodies. In 
 Greece the same opinion was held by Empedocles; but 
 whether he borrowed this idea from the Egyptians, as is 
 commonly supposed to have been the case, or whether 
 Pythagoras and his teacher Pherecydes learnt it in India, 
 is a question still hotly discussed. To me it seems that 
 such a theory was so natural that it might perfectly well 
 have arisen independently among different races. Among 
 the Aryan races, Italian, Celtic, and Scythic or Hyper- 
 borean tribes are mentioned as having entertained a faith 
 in Metempsychosis, nay, traces of it have lately been dis- 
 covered even among the uncivilised inhabitants of America, 
 Africa, and Eastern Asia. And why not ? In India certainly 
 it developed spontaneously ; and if this was so in India, why 
 not in other countries, particularly among races belonging 
 to the same linguistic stock? It should be remembered, 
 however, that some systems, particularly the Sarakhya- 
 phiiosophy, do not admit what we commonly understand by 
 Seelemvanderung. If we translate the Samkhya Purusha 
 by Soul instead of Self, it is not the Punish a that migrates, 
 but the S&kshma-tarira, the subtile body. The Self remains 
 always intact, a mere looker on, and its highest purpose is 
 this recognition that it is above and apart from anything 
 that has sprung from Prakr/ti or nature. 
 
 8. Immortality Of the Soul. 
 
 The idea of the immortality of the soul also should be 
 included in what was the common property of all Indian 
 philosophers. This idea was so completely taken for 
 granted that we look in vain for any elaborate arguments 
 in support of it. Mortality with the Hindus is so entirely 
 restricted to the body which decays and decomposes before 
 our very eyes, that such an expression as Atrnano mrita- 
 tvam, immortality of the Self , sounds almost tautological in 
 Sanskrit. No doubt, the followers of Brihaspati would 
 
7O6 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 deny a future life, but all the other schools rather fear 
 than doubt a future life, a long-continued metempsychosis ; 
 and as to a final annihilation of the true Self, that would 
 sound to Indian ears as a contradiction in itself. There 
 are scholars so surprised at this unwavering belief in a 
 future and an eternal life among the people of India, that 
 they have actually tried to trace it back to a belief sup- 
 posed to be universal among savages who thought that 
 man left a ghost behind who might assume the body of an 
 animal or even the shape of a tree. This is a mere fancy, 
 and though it cannot of course be disproved, it does not 
 thereby acquire any right to oui? consideration. Besides, 
 why should the Aryas have had to learn lessons from 
 savages, as they at one time were no doubt savages them- 
 selves, and need not have forgotten the so-called wisdom 
 of savages as little as the $udras themselves from whom 
 they are supposed to have learnt it? . . 
 
 3. Pessimism. 
 
 All Indian philosophers have been charged with pes- 
 simism, and in some cases such a charge may seem well 
 founded, but not in all. People who derived tfyeir name 
 for good from a word which originally meant nothing but 
 being or real, Sat, are not likely to have lopked upon what 
 is as what ought not to be. Indian philpsophers are by 
 no means dwelling for ever on the miseries of life. They 
 are not always whining and protesting that life is not 
 worth living. That is not their pessimism. They simply 
 state that they received the first impulse to philosophical 
 reflection from the fact that there is suffering in the world. 
 They evidently thought that in a perfect world suffering 
 had no place, that it is something anomalous, something 
 that ougnt at all events to be accounted for, And, if possible, 
 overcome. Pain, certainly, seems to be an imperfection, 
 and, as such, may well have caused the question why it 
 existed, and how it could be annihilated. But this is not 
 the disposition which we are accustomed to call pessimism. 
 Indian philosophy contains no outcry against divine injus- 
 tice, and 'in no way encourages suicidal expedients. They 
 would, in fact, be of no avail, because, according to Indian 
 
PESSIMISM. 107 
 
 views, the same troubles and the same problems would 
 have to be faced again and again in another life. Con- 
 sidering that the aim of all Indian philosophy was the 
 removal 01 suffering, which was caused by nescience, and 
 the attainment of the highest happiness, which was pro- 
 duced by knowledge, we should have more right to call it 
 eudsemonistic than pessimistic. 
 
 It is interesting, however, to observe the unanimity with 
 which the principal systems of philosophy in India, nay 
 some of their religious systems also, start from the conviq- 
 tion ' that the world is full of suffering, and that this 
 suffering should be accounted for and removed. This 
 seems to have been one of the principal impulses, if n'ot 
 the principal impulse to philosophical thought in India. 
 If we begin with traimini, we cannot expect much real 
 philosophy from his Purva-Mimamsa, which is chiefly con- 
 cerned with ceremonial questions, such as sacrifices, &c. 
 But though these sacrifices are represented as being the 
 means of a certain kind of beatitude, and so far as serving 
 to diminish or extinguish the ordinary afflictions of men, 
 they were never supposed to secure the highest .beatitude 
 for which all the other philosophers were striving. The 
 Uttara-Mimamsa and all the other philosophies take much 
 higher ground. BadarayaTia teaches that the cause of all 
 evil is Avidya or nescience, and that it is the object of his 
 philosophy to remove that nescience by moans of science 
 ( Vidya), and thus to bring about that true knowledge of 
 Brahman, which is also the highest bliss (Taitt. Up. II, i). 
 The*Samkhya-philosophy, at least such as we know it 
 from the Karikas and the Sutras, not however the Tattva- 
 samasa, begins at once with the recognition of the existence 
 of the three kinds of suffering, and proclaims as its highest 
 object the complete cessation of all pain ; while the Yoga 
 philosophers, after pointing out the way to meditative 
 absorption (Samadhi), declare that this is the best means of 
 escaping from all earthly troubles (II, 2), and, in the end, 
 of reaching Kaivalya or perfect freedom. The Vaiseshika 
 promises to its followers knowledge of truth, and through 
 it final cessation of all pain ; and even Gotama's philosophy 
 of logic holds out in its first Sutra complete blessedness 
 
IO8 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 (Apavarga) as its highest reward, which is obtained by the 
 complete destruction of all pain by means of logic. That 
 Buddha's religion had the same origin, a clear perception 
 of human suffering and its causes, and had the same object, 
 the annihilation of DuAkha or suffering (Nirvana), is too 
 well known to require further elucidation, but it should 
 be remembered that other systems also have one and the 
 same name for the state to which they aspire, whether 
 Nirvana or Du/tkhanta, i. e. end of Du&kha, pain. 
 
 If therefore all Indian philosophy professes its ability to 
 remove pain, it can hardly be called pessimistic in the 
 ordinary sense of the word. Even physical pain, though 
 it cannot be removed from the body, ceases to affect the 
 soul, as soon as the Self has fully -realised its aloofness 
 from the body, while all mental pain, being traced back to 
 our worldly attachments, would vanish by freeing our- 
 selves from the desires which cause these attachments. 
 The cause of all suffering having been discovered in our- 
 selves, in our works and thoughts, whether in this or in 
 a previous existence, all clamour against divine injustice is 
 silenced at once. We are what we have made ourselves, 
 we suffer what, we have done, we reap what we have sown, 
 and it is the sowing of good seed, though without any hope 
 of a rich harvest, that is represented as the chief purpose 
 of a philosopher's life on earth. 
 
 Besides this conviction that all suffering can be removed 
 by an insight into its nature and origin, there are some 
 other ideas which must be traced back to that rich treasury 
 of thought which was open to every thinking man in India. 
 These common ideas assumed, no doubt, different guises in 
 different systems, but this ought not to deceive us, and a 
 little reflection allows us to perceive their common source. 
 Thus, when the cause of suffering is inquired for, they all 
 have but one answer to give, though under different' names. 
 The Vedanta gives Avidya, nescience, the Smkhya, Avi- 
 veka, non-discrimination, the Nyaya, Hithy%7ina, false 
 knowledge, and these various aberrations from knowledge 
 are generally represented as Bandha or bondage, to be 
 broken again by means of that true knowledge which is 
 supplied by the various systems of philosophy. 
 
109 
 
 4. Xarman. 
 
 The next idea that seems ingrained in the Indian mind, 
 and therefore finds expression in all the- systems of philo- 
 sophy, is a belief in Karman deed, that is, the continuous 
 working of every thought, word, and deed through all 
 ages. * All works, good or bad, all must bear and do bear 
 fruit/ is a sentiment never doubted by any Hindvi, whether 
 to-day or thousands of years ago l . 
 
 And the same eternity which is claimed for works and 
 their results is claimed for the soul also, only with this 
 difference, that while works will cease to work when real 
 freedom has been obtained, the soul itself continues after 
 the obtainment of freedom or final beatitude. The idea of 
 the soul ever coming to an end is so strange to the Indian 
 mind that there seemed to be no necessity for anything 
 like proofs of immortality, so common in European philo- 
 sophy. Knowing what is meant by ' to be/ the idea that 
 'to be' could ever become 'not to be' seems to have been 
 impossible to the mind of the Hindus. If by 'to be' is 
 meant Samsara or the world, however long it may last, 
 then Hindu philosophers would never look upon it as real. 
 It never was, it never is, and never will be. Length of 
 time, however enormous, is nothing in the eyes of Hindu 
 philosophers. To reckon a thousand years as one day would 
 not satisfy them. They represent length of ^ime by much 
 bolder similes, such as when a man once in every thousand 
 years passes his silken kerchief over the chain of the Hima- 
 layan mountains. By the time he has completely wiped 
 them out by this process the world or Samsara may indeed 
 come to an end, but even then eternity and reality lie far 
 beyond. In order to get an easier hold of this eternity, 
 the very popular idea of Pralayas, i. e. destructions or 
 absorptions of the whole world, has been invented. Accord- 
 ing to the Ved&nta there occurs at the end of each Kalpa 
 a Fralaya or dissolution of the universe, and Brahman is 
 then reduced to its causal condition (K&ran&vastha), con- 
 taining both soul and matter in an Avyakta (undeveloped) 
 
 1 Cf. The Mysteries of Karma, revealed by a Brahmin Yogee, Allaha- 
 bad, 1898. 
 
110 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 state *. At the end of this Pralaya, however, Brahman 
 creates or lets out of himself a new world, matter becomes 
 gross and visible once more, and souls become active and 
 re-embodied, though with a higher enlightenment (Vik&sa), 
 and all this according to their previous merits and demerits. 
 Brahman has then cissumed its new Karyavastha or effec- 
 tive state which lasts for another Ealpa. But all this refers 
 to the world of change and unreality only. It is the world 
 of Karman, the temporary produce of Nescience, of Avidya, 
 or Maya, it is not yet real reality. In the Samkhya- 
 philosophy these Pralayas take place whenever the three 
 Qunas of Prakriti recover their equipoise 2 , while creation 
 results from the upsetting of the equipoise between them. 
 What is truly eternal, is not affected by the cosmic illusion, 
 or at least is so for a time only, and may recover at any 
 moment its self-knowledge, that is, its self-being, and its 
 freedom from all conditions and fetters. 
 
 According to the Vaiseshikas Ihis process of creation 
 and dissolution depends on the atoms. If they are sepa- 
 rated, there ensues dissolution (Pralaya), if motion springs 
 up in them and they are united, there follows what we 
 call creation. 
 
 The idea of the reabsorption of the world at the end of 
 a Kalpa (aeon) and its emergence again in the next Kalpa, 
 does not occur as yet in the old Upanishads, nay even the 
 name of Sawsara is absent from them ; and Professor 
 Garbe is inclined therefore to claim the idea of Pralaya as 
 more recent, as peculiar to the S&mkhya-philosophy, and 
 as adopted from it by the other systems 3 . It may be so, 
 but in the Bhagavad-gita IX, 7, the idea of Pralayas, 
 absorptions, and of Kalpas or ages, of their end and their 
 beginning (Kalpakshaye arid Kalp&dau), are already quite 
 familiar to the poets. The exact nature of the Pralayas 
 differs so much, according to different poets and philo- 
 sophers, that it is far more likely that they may all have 
 borrowed it from a common source, that is, from the 
 popular belief of those among whom they were brought 
 up and from whom they learnt their language and with it 
 
 1 Thibaut, V. S. I, p. xxviii. * S&mkhya-Stitras VI, 43. 
 
 * Sawkhya-Philosophie, p. 221 
 
TETRBE GUtfAS. . Ill 
 
 the materials of their thoughts, than that they should 
 each have invented the same theory under slightly varying 
 aspects. 
 
 5. Infallibility of tile Veda. 
 
 One more common element presupposed by Indian philo- 
 sophy might be pointed out in the recognition of the 
 supreme authority and the revealed character ascribed to 
 the Veda. This, in ancient times, is certainly a startling 
 idea, familiar as it may sound to us at present. The 
 Samkhya-philosophy is supposed to have been originally 
 without a belief in the revealed character of the Vedas, but 
 it certainly speaks of Sruti (Sfttras I, 5). As long as we 
 know the Samkhya, it recognises the authority of the Veda, 
 calling it /S y abda, and appeals to ifc even in matters of minor 
 importance. It is important to observe that the distinction 
 between $ruti and SmHti, revelation and tradition, so well 
 known in the later phases of philosophy, is not to be found 
 as yet in the old Upanishads. 
 
 6. Three Chinas. 
 
 The theory of the three Giirias also, which has been 
 claimed as originally peculiar to the Samkhya-philosophy, 
 seems in its unscientific form to have been quite familiar 
 to most Hindu philosophers. The impulse to everything 
 in nature, the cause of all life and variety, is ascribed to 
 the three GuTias. Guna means quality, but we are warned 
 expressly not to take it, when it occurs in philosophy, in 
 the ordinary sense of quality, but rather as something 
 substantial by itself, so that the Gu9?as become in fact the 
 component constituents of nature. In the most general 
 sense they represent no more, than thesis, antithesis, and 
 something between the two, such as cold, warm, and neither 
 cold nor warm; good, bad, and neither good nor bad; 
 bright, dark, and neither bright nor dark ; and so on 
 through every part of physical and moral nature. Tension 
 between these qualities produces activity and struggle: 
 equilibrium leads to temporary or final rest. This mutual 
 tension is sometimes represented as Vishamatvam, uneven- 
 ness, caused by a preponderance of one of the three, as we 
 
112 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 read, for instance, in the Maitr&yaTia Upanishad V, a : 
 ' This world was in the beginning Tamas (darkness) indeed. 
 That Tamas stood in the Highest. Moved by the Highest, 
 it became uneven. In that form it was Ragras (obscurity). 
 That Ragras, when moved, became uneven, and this is the 
 form of Sattva (goodness). That Sattva, when moved, ran 
 forth as essence (Rasa)/ Here we have clearly the recog- 
 nised names of the three Gutias, but the Maitrayana Upani- 
 shad shows several S&wkhya influences, and it might 
 therefore be Jargued that it does not count for much, in 
 order to establish the general acceptance of the theory of 
 the GuTias, not for more, at all events, than the later Upani- 
 ahads or the Bhagavad-git&, in which the three Gurais are 
 fully recognised. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Ved&nta or Trttara-MiuiA?ns. 
 
 IF now we pass on to a consideration of the six orthodox 
 systems of philosophy, and begin with* the Vedanta, we 
 have to take as our chief guides the Sutras of Badarayajia, 
 and the commentary of amkara. We know little of 
 Badarayawa, the reputed author of the SMras. Of course 
 when we possess commentaries on any Sutras, we know 
 that the Sutras must have existed before their commen- 
 taries, that the Sutras of Badareayana were older therefore 
 than Samkara, their commentator. In India he has been 
 identified with Vyasa, the collector of the M^h&bh&rata, 
 but without sufficient evidence, nor should we gain much 
 by that identification, as Vyasa of the Mahabh&rata also is 
 hardly more than a name to -us.' Thi.$- Vy|sa is said by 
 $amkara, III, 3, 32, to have lived at the end of the 
 Dvapara and the beginning of the Kali age, and to have 
 had intercourse with the gods, 1. c., I, 3, 33, But though 
 he- calls him the author of the Mahabharata, 1. c., II, 3, 47, 
 $amkara, in the whole of his commentary on the Ved&nta- 
 Sutras, never mentions that the Vyasa of the epic was the 
 author of the book on which he is commenting, though he 
 i nentions Badarayarta as such. This convinced Windisch- 
 inann that Samkara himself did not consider these two 
 Vyasas as one and the same person, and this judgment 
 ought not to have been lightly disturbed. It was excus- 
 able in Ctflebrooke, but not after what had been said by 
 Windischmann, particularly when no new argument could 
 be produced. All we can say is that, whatever the date of 
 the Bhagavad-gitft is, and it is a part of the Mah&bharata, 
 the age of the Vedanta-Sfttras .and of Bddardyana must 
 have been earlier. 
 
 We may also say that B&dar&yawa himself never refers 
 to any work which could be assigned with any amount of 
 
 I 
 
114 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 certainty to any time after our era. Even when Badara- 
 ya-na quotes the Smriti, it does not follow that $amkara is 
 always right when suggesting passages from the Mahabha- 
 rata (Bhagavad-gita), or irom Manu, for it is not too much 
 to say that similar passages may have occurred in other 
 and more ancient Smriti works also. Badafaya-na is cer- 
 tainly most provoking in never quoting his authorities by 
 name. If we could follow $amkara, Badaraya?ia would 
 have referred in his Sutras to Bauddhas, (ramas, Pasupatas 
 and Paw fearatras, to Yogins, Vaiseshikas, though not to 
 Naiyayikas, to Sarakhyas, and to the doctrines of (?aimini 3 . 
 By the name of Sniti BadarayaTia; according to $amkara, 
 meant the following TJpanishads, Brihad-&ra?iyaka, Kh&n- 
 dogya, Kanaka, Kaushitaki, Aitareya, Taittiriya, Mundaka, 
 Prasna, $veta8vatara, and (?abala. 
 
 This must suffice to indicate the intellectual sphere in 
 which 'BadarayaTia moved, or was supposed to have moved, 
 and so far may be said to determine his chronological posi- 
 tion as far anterior to that of another Vyasa, who was the 
 father of $uka, the teacher of Gauc?apada, the teacher of 
 Govinda, the teacher of $amkara y and who, if >$amkara 
 belonged to the eighth century, might have lived in about 
 the sixth century or our era 2 . 
 
 The literary works to which jSamkara refers in his com- 
 menta,ry are, according to Deusscn (System, p. 34), among 
 the Samhitas, that of the Rig-veda, of the Va^asaneyins. 
 MaitrayaTtiy'as and Taittiriyas, and Ka&ag (nothing from 
 the Sama and Atharva-samhitas) ; among the Brahiria??,as, 
 the Aitareya, Arsheya, Shacvimsa, Datapaths, Taittiriya, 
 Tar?^ya, AL Aandogya ; among the AraTiyakas, Aitareya 
 and Taittirfya; and among the Upanishads, Aitareya 
 Bnhad-araTiyaka, Isa, Katta, Kaushitaki-brahma-na, Kena, 
 K Aandogya, Maitrayaniya, Mut?xiaka., Prasna, $vetasvatara, 
 Taittiriya. These are sometimes called the old or classical 
 Upanishads, as being quoted by $a?>ikara, though Paimgi, 
 Agnirahasya, Narayaniya and" (Jabala may have to be 
 
 1 Deusscn, System dss Vod&nta, p. 24. 
 
 2 Another stemma of Vyasa, given by native writers, is Naraynwa, 
 Vasiah^a (Padmnbhava), tfakti, PiinX?ara, Vy\a, Suka, Gaudapada, 
 HastAmalaka (Sishya), Troika, VArttikakftra, &c 
 
VEDANTA OR UTTARA-MIMA3fS. 115 
 
 added. As belonging to Snmti /Samkara quotes MaM- 
 bhsirata (Bhagavad-ftM), RamayaTia, M^rkarTdeya-pur^oia, 
 Manu, Y&ska, Pa/mm, ParibhasMs, S&wkhya-k&rik, and he 
 refers to S&rakhya-Siltras (though it is important to observe 
 that he gives no ipsissima verba from our S&mkhya- 
 Sfttras), to Yoga-Sfttras, Nyaya-Sfttras, Vaiseshika-Sfttras, 
 and to Mim&ms-Sfttras. When he alludes to Sugata or 
 Buddha he refers once to a passage which has been traced 
 in the Abhidharma-Kos&a-vy&khylL He also knew the 
 Bh&gavatas and the Svapnadhy&yavids. 
 
 Though the name of Ved&nta does not occur in the old 
 Upanishads, we can hardly doubt that it was the Ved&ntic 
 thoughts, contained in the Upanishads, which gave the first 
 impulse to more systematic philosophical speculations in 
 India. Several scholars have tried to prove that S&mkhya 
 ideas prevailed in India at an earlier time than the Ve- 
 dantie ideas. But though there certainly are germs of 
 Samkhya theories in the Upanishads, they are but few and 
 far between, while the strictly Ved&ntic concepts meet us 
 at every step in the hymns, the Brahma^as, the AraTi- 
 yakas and in the SMras. Vedanta is clearly the native 
 philosophy of India. It is true that this philosophy is not 
 yet treated systematically in the Upanishads, but neither 
 is the S&mkhya. To us who care only for the growth of 
 philosophical thought on the ancient soil of India, Ved&nta 
 is clearly the first growth ; and the question whether 
 Kapila lived before Badarayana, or whether the systematic 
 treatment of the S&mkhya took place before that of the 
 Vedanta, can hardly arise. 
 
 , I only wonder that tho?^ who maintain the priority of 
 the S&mkhya, have not appealed to the Lalita-vistara, 
 twelfth chapter, where, among the subjects known to 
 Buddha, are mentioned not only Nirgha^fa, /Pandas, 
 Ya<7/7akalpa, ffyotisha, but likewise S&mkhya, Y^ga, Vaise- 
 shika Vesika ( Vaidy aka?), Arthavidy, Barhaspatya, As/carya, 
 Asura, Mrigapakshiruta, and Hetuvidy t a (Nyayal There 
 are several names which are difficult to identify, out there 
 can be no doubt that the five philosophical systems here 
 mentioned were intended for Smkhya, Yoga, Vaiseshika, 
 Ny&y&, and B&rhaspatya. The two Mim&Tnsas are absent, 
 
 I 2 
 
Jl6 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 but their absence does not prove that they did not exist, 
 but only that they were considered too orthodox to f orm 
 a proper subject of study for Buddha This shows the real 
 character of the antagonism between Buddhism and Brah- 
 manism, now so often denied or minimised 1 , and is con- 
 firmed by similar references, as when Hema/candra in his 
 Abhidhana mentions indeed such names as Arhatas or 
 Gainas, Saugatas or Buddhists, Naiyayikas, Yoga, Sam- 
 khya or Kapila, Vaiseshika, Barhaspatya or Nastika, 
 .K"arvaka or Lokayatika, but carefully omits the two really 
 dangerous systems, the Mimamsa of Badarayana and that 
 of Gaimini. 
 
 It should also be remembered that considerable doubt has 
 recently been" thrown on the age of the Chinese translation 
 of the Lalita-vistara, which seemed to enable us to assign 
 the original to a date at all events anterior to-7o A.D. 
 The case is not quite clear yet, but we must learn to be 
 more cautious with Chinese dates. 
 
 It has been the custom to give the name of Vedanta- 
 philosophy to the Uttara-Mimawsa of BadarayaTia, nor is 
 there any reason why that name should not be retained. 
 If Vedanta is used as synonymous with Upanishad, the 
 Uttara-Mimamsa is certainly the Vedanta-philosophy, or 
 a systematic treatment of the philosophical teaching of the 
 Upanishads. It is true, no doubt, that VasishAa as well 
 as Gautama distinguishes between Upanishads and Ve- 
 dantas (XXII, 9), and the commentator to Gautama XIX, 7 
 states distinctly that those parts only of the AraTiyakas 
 which are not Upanishads are to be called Vedantas. But 
 there is no real harm in the received name, and we see 
 that the followers of the Vedanta were often called 
 Aupanishadas. 
 
 Badarayana. 
 
 As to BadarayaTia, the reputed author of the Vedanta- 
 Sfttras, we had to confess before that we know nothing 
 about him. He is to us a name and an intellectual power, 
 but nothing else. We know the date of his great commen- 
 tator, $arakara, in the eighth century A.D., and we know 
 
 1 See Brahmav&din, Fob., 1898, p. 454. 
 
BADAKAYA^A. 117 
 
 that another commentator, Bodhayana, was even earlier. 
 We also know that Bodhay ana's commentary was followed 
 by Ramanu(/a. It is quite possible that Bodhayana, like 
 Ramanm/a, represented a more ancient and more faithful 
 interpretation of Badaraya?ia's Sutras, and that $amkara's 
 philosophy in its unflinching monism, is his own rather 
 than Badarayana's. But no MS. of Bodhayana has yet 
 been discovered. 
 
 A still more ancient commentator, Upavarsha by name, 
 is mentioned, and $amkara (III, 3, ,53) calls him Bhagavad 
 or Saint. But it must remain doubtful again whether he 
 can be identified with the Upavarsha, who, according to 
 the Katha-sarit-sagara, was the teacher of Pa/iini. 
 
 It must not be forgotten that, according to Indian tra- 
 dition, Badarayana, as the author of the Vedanta-Sutras, is 
 called Vyasa or Vedavyasa, Dvaipayana or Krishna, Dvai- 
 payana. Here we are once more in a labyrinth from which 
 it is difficult to find an exit. Vyasa or Krishna Dvaipa- 
 yana is the name given to the author of the Mahabharata, 
 and no two styles can well be more different than that of 
 the Vyasa of the Mahabharata and that of Vyasa, the 
 supposed author of the so-called Vyasa-Sutras. I think 
 we should remember that Vyasa, as a noun, meant no more 
 than compilation or arrangement, as opposed to Samasa, 
 conciseness or abbreviation ; so that the same story might 
 be recited Samasena, in an abbreviated, and Vyasena in 
 a complete form. 
 
 We should remember next that Vyasa is called Parasarya, 
 the son of Parasara and Satyavati (truthful), and that 
 Pa/mm mentions one P&rasarya as the author of the 
 Bhikshu- Sutras, while Va/caspati Misra declares that the 
 Bhikshu- Sfttras are the same as the Vedanta-Sutras, and 
 that the followers of Par&sarya were in consequence called 
 Parasarins. (Pa?i. IV, 3, no.) 
 
 This, if we could rely 011 it, would prove the existence of 
 our Sutras before the time of P.avmni, or in the fifth cen- 
 tury B.G This would be a most important gain for the 
 chronology of Indian philosophy. But if, as we are told, 
 Vyasa collected (Vivy t asa) not only the Vedas, the Maha- 
 bMrata, the Puranas, but also the Vyasa-Sfttras, nay even 
 
Il8 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 a prose commentary on Pata/7(/ali's Yoga- Sutras, we can 
 hardly doubt that the work ascribed to him must be taken 
 as the work of several people or of a literary period rather 
 than of one man. I formerly thought that Vyasa might 
 have represented the period in which the first attempts 
 were made to reduce the ancient mnemonic literature of 
 India to writing, but there is nothing in tradition to sup- 
 port such a view, unless we thought that Vyasa had some 
 connexion with Nyasa (writing). Indian tradition places 
 the great Vyasa between the third and fourth ages of the 
 present world, whatever that may mean, if translated into 
 our modern chronological language. If Vya-sa had really 
 anything to do with our Vedanta-Sutras, it would hardly 
 have been more than that he arranged or edited them. 
 His name does not occur in the Sutras themselves, while 
 that of Badarayaiia does, and likewise that of Badari, 
 a name mentioned by Gaimini also in his Purva-Mimamsa 1 . 
 In the Bhagavad-gita, which might well be placed as con- 
 temporary with the Vedanta-Sutras, or somewhat later, 
 Vyasa is mentioned as one of the Devarshis with Asita 
 and Devala (X, 13), and he is called the greatest of Rishis 
 (X, 37). But all becomes confusion again, if we remember 
 that tradition makes Vyasa the author of the Mahabharata, 
 and therefore of the Bhagavad-git& itself, which is even 
 called an Upanishad. 
 
 The only passage which seems to me to settle the rela- 
 tive age of the Vedanta-Sutras and the Bhagavad-gita is 
 in XIII, 3 2 , ' Hear and learn from me the Supreme Soul 
 (Kshetra</j7a) that has been celebrated in many ways by 
 Rishis in various metres, and by the words of the Brahma- 
 Sdtras, which are definite and furnished with reasons. 1 
 Here the words ' Brahma - sutra-padai/t,' * the words of the 
 Brahma-Sutras,' seem to me to refer clearly to the recog- 
 nised title of the Vedanta or Brahma-Sutras. Whatever 
 native authorities may say to the contrary, the words 
 * definite arid argumentative' can refer to Sutras only. 
 And if it is said, on the other side, that these Brahma- 
 
 1 Colcbrookc, M. E., II, p. 354. 
 
 * Prut T. R. Amaluerkar, Priority of the Vedanta-Sutras, 1895. 
 
BADAItAYAiVA. 119 
 
 Sutras, whesi they refer to Sinriti, refer clearly to passages 
 taken from the Bhagavad-gita also, and must therefore be 
 later, I doubt it. They never mention the name of the 
 Bhagavad-gita, nor do they give any ipsissima, verba from 
 it, and as every SrnHti presupposes a $ruti, these references 
 may have been meant for passages which the Bhagavad- 
 gtjba had ada-pted, and may have shared with other Sm?*itis. 
 Brahma-Sutra, on the contrary, is a distinct title, all the 
 more significant where it occurs, because neither the word 
 Sutra nor Brahma-Sftlra occurs again in any other passage 
 of the Gita. However, even admitting that the Brahma- 
 Sutras quoted from the Bhagavad-gita, as the Gita certainly 
 appeals to the Brahma-Sutras, this reciprocal quotation 
 might be accounted for. by their being contemporaneous, 
 as in the case of other Sutras which, as there can be no 
 doubt, quote one from the other, and sometimes verbatim. 
 
 As to the commentary on Pata/v^ali's Yoga-Sutras being 
 the work of the same Vyasa, this seenis to me altogether 
 out of the question. There are hundreds of people in India 
 who have the name of Yyasa. Nor has it ever been 
 positively proved that Pata/)$aii, the reputed Author of the 
 Yoga-Sutras, was the same person as Pata#</ali, the author 
 of the Mahabhashya, the great commentary on Pamni's 
 grammar, and on Katyayana's Yarttikas. Some scholars 
 have rushed at this conclusion, chiefly in order to fix the 
 date of the Yoga-Sutras, but this also would force us to 
 ascribe the most heterogeneous works to one and the same 
 author l . 
 
 Even the age of Pata%ali, the grammarian and author 
 of the Mahabhashya, seems to me by no means positively 
 settled. I gladly admit the plausibility of Goldstiicker's 
 arguments that if Pata/%ali presupposed the existence of 
 the Maurya-dynasty he might be placed in the third 
 century 13. c. I look upon the ArJfc&A, which he mentions 
 in the famous Maurya-passage, as having been devised by 
 the Mauryas for the sake of trade, as the first coins with 
 images of the gods, introduced by the Maurya-dynasty. 
 Such coins, when they- contain images of the go<is,*should 
 
 1 Both Lasscn and Garbe, Die SuMkljya-Philosophio, p. 46, seem 
 inclined to accept the identity of the two Pata%alia. 
 
12O INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 not, according to the grammarian, be called simply by the 
 names of the gods, but by a derivative name, not $iva, but 
 $ivaka, just as we distinguish between an Angel and an 
 Angelot. And I pointed out before, the very gods men- 
 tioned here by Pata ! /#ali are the gods the images of which 
 do occur on the oldest Indian coins which we possess, viz. 
 $iva, Skanda, and Vfc&kha, the last, if taken for Kama. 
 As a constructive date therefore, that assigned by Gold- 
 stiieker to Pata/f^rali might stand, but that is very different 
 from* a positive date. Besides, the name of Maurya in the 
 MahabMshya is doubtful and does not occur again in it. 
 
 We saw before that Badarayana refers in his Sutras to 
 Gaimini, the author of the Piirva-Mimams^-Sutras, and that 
 Gaimini returns the compliment by referring to BadarayaTia 
 by name. B&dar&yaT&a is likewise acquainted with the 
 atheistical doctrines of Kapila and the atomistic theories of 
 KanMa, and tries to refute them. But in India this is far 
 from proving the later date of Badarayana. "We must 
 learn to look on BadarayaTia, (jaimini, Kapila, and similar 
 names, as simply eponymous heroes of different philo- 
 sophies; so that at whatever time these systems were 
 reduced to the form of Sfttras, certain opinions could be 
 called by their names. Colebrooke states, on the authority 
 of a scholiast to Manu and Y%;7avalkya, that the instruc- 
 tions of a teacher were often reduced to writing by his 
 pupils, and that this would account for the fact that the 
 author of a system is often quoted in the third person in 
 his own book. It would be interesting if this could be 
 established with reference to ancient texts, but I remember 
 nothing of the kind. All this is very discouraging to 
 students accustomed to chronological accuracy, but it has 
 always seemed to me far better to acknowledge our poverty 
 and the utter absence of historical dates in the literary 
 history of India, than to build up systems after systems 
 which collapse at the first breath of criticism or scepticism. 
 
 When I speak of a chronology of thought, what I mean 
 is that there is a chronology which enables us to distinguish 
 a period of Vedic thought, subdivided into three periods of 
 Mantras, Brahmarcas, and Upanishads. No^ one would 
 doubt the succession of these three periods of language, but 
 
FUNDAMENTAL DOCTBINES OF THE VfiDAKTA. 121 
 
 if some scholars desire to extend each period to thousands of 
 years, I can only wish them success. I confess I do not 
 share the idea that we should claim for Indian "literature 
 as remote an antiquity as possible. The same attempts 
 were made before, but nothing was gained by them, and 
 much was lost as soon as more sober and critical ideas- 
 began to prevail. After the Upanishad-period would follow 
 that of Buddhism, marked, on the Buddhist side, by the 
 Suttas, on the Brahmanic side, and possibly somewhat 
 earlier, by the large mass of Sutra literature. To that 
 period seem to me to belong, by similarity of thought, if 
 not of style, the six systems of philosophy. I should havq 
 said by style also, because the earliest form in which we 
 possess these systems is that of Sutras. Unfortunately we 
 know now how easily even that very peculiar style can be, 
 and in case of the S&mkhya and some of the legal Smritis, 
 has been imitated. We must not therefore ascribe too 
 much weight to this. The next period would be what 
 I have called that of the Renaissance, beginning at a time 
 when Sanskrit had ceased to be the language spoken by 
 the people, though it continued, as it has to the present 
 day, to be cultivated by the learned. 
 
 Such are the difficulties that meet us when we attempt 
 to introduce anything like chronological order into the 
 literature of India, and it seems to me far better to state 
 them honestly than to disguise them. After all, the im- 
 portance of that literature, and more particularly of its 
 philosophical portion, is quite independent of age. It has 
 something to teach us quite apart from the names and 
 dates of its authors ; and grateful as we should feel for any 
 real light that can be thrown on these chronological mazes, 
 we must not forget that the highest interest of the Vedanta 
 and the other philosophies is not their age, but their truth. 
 
 Fundamental Doctrines of the Vedanta. 
 
 If we ask for the fundamental doctrines of the Vedanta, 
 the Hindus themselves have helped us and given us in 
 a few words what they themselves consider as the quint- 
 essence of that system of thought. I quoted these words at 
 the end of my ' Three Lectures on the Vedanta 7 (1894): 
 
122 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 ' In one half verse I shall tell you what has been taught 
 in thousands of volumes: Brahman is true, the world is 
 false, the soul is Brahman and nothing else 1 .' 
 
 And again: 
 
 1 There is nothing worth gaining, there is nothing worth 
 enjoying, there is nothing worth knowing but Brahman 
 alone, for he who knows Brahman, is Brahman/ 
 
 This resume of the Vedanta is very true, and very helpful 
 as a reswme of that system of philosophy. After all we 
 must distinguish in every philosophy its fundamental 
 doctrines aiid its minute details. We can never carry al] 
 these details in our memory, but we may always have 
 present before our mind the general structure of a great 
 system of thought and its salient points, whether it be the 
 philosophy of Kant or of -Plato or of B&dar^ya/fta. It 
 would be quite impossible in a historical sketch^ of the six 
 Indian philosophical systems to give all their details. They 
 are often unimportant, and may easily be gathered from 
 the texts themselves, such as we have them in the original 
 or in translations ; but they must not be allowed to crowd 
 and to obscure that general view of the six systems which 
 alone is meant to be given in these pages. 
 
 We have another and still shorter abstract of A the Vedanta 
 in the famous words addressed by Udclalaka Armti to his 
 son & vetaketu (Kh&nd. Up. VI, 8), namely, ' Tat tvam asi/ 
 'Thou art That.' These words, however, convey little 
 meaning without the context in which they occur, that is 
 to say, unless we know what is meant by the Tat, that, and 
 by the Tvam, thou. The Tat is what we saw shadowed forth 
 in the Upanishads as the^ Brahman, as the cause of the 
 world, the Tvain is the Atrium, the Self in its various 
 meanings, from the ordinary I to the divine Soul or Self, 
 recognised in man ; and it is the highest aim of the Vediinta 
 to show that these two are in reality one^. This fearless 
 synthesis, embodied in the simple words Tat tvam asi, 
 seems to me the boldest and truest synthesis in the whole 
 history of philosophy. Even Kant, who clearly recognised 
 the Tat or it, that is the Ding an sick behind the objective 
 
 1 See also Thoosophy, p. 3i7 : 
 
 '* Mumfukyu Up. II, Ayum Atina Brahma. 
 
FUNDAMENTAL DOCTIUNES 01<' T11E VEDAMTA. 123 
 
 world, never went far enough to recognise the identity of 
 the Tat, the objective Ding an sick, and the Tvam, the 
 Ding an sick on the subjective side of the world. Among 
 ourselves such a synthesis of the subjective with the objec- 
 tive Self would even now rouse the strongest theological. 
 if not philosophical, protests, whereas the theologians of 
 India discuss it with perfect equanimity, and see in it the 
 truest solution of the riddle of the world. In order fully 
 to understand it, we must try to place ourselves firmly on 
 the standpoint of the Vedanta philosophers, forgetting all 
 our own inherited theological misgivings. Their idea of 
 the Supreme Cause of the universe went far beyond what 
 is meant by God, tiie creator and ruier of the world 
 (Pra^apati). That being was to them a manifestation only 
 of the Supreme Cause or Brahman, it was Brahman as 
 phenomenal, and it followed that, as Brahman, as they 
 held, was indeed the cause of everything, the All in All, 
 man also could be nothing but a phenomenon of Brahman. 
 The idea therefore that it would be blasphemy to make the 
 creature equal to the creator so far as their substance was 
 concerned, never presented itself to their minds. Their 
 Tat was something behind or above the purely personal 
 creator, it was the absolute divine essence, the Godhead, 
 manifested in a subjective and personal creator, and present 
 likewise in all its phenomenal manifestations, including 
 gods and men. Even their god beyond all gods (Deveshu 
 adhi eka/i) did not satisfy them any longer, as it did in the 
 hymns of the Rig-veda; and though they might have 
 shrunk from identifying gods and men with that personal 
 divine being, Pragapati, the lord of all creatures, they saw 
 nothing but truth in the doctrine that man in his true 
 nature was the same with Brahman, that he shares in the 
 nature of Brahman, or in the spirit of God. They saw, in 
 fact, that God is hardly a name that can be used for that 
 Supreme Brahman, the absolute Cause of the universe, and 
 the absolute Cause of Prar/fipati also, when taken as the 
 creative god. I say when taken as such, for we ought 
 never to forget that we have always to be satisfied with 
 what we take God to be (Vidyamatra), and that we can 
 never go beyond. Translated into the language of the 
 
124 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 early Christian philosophers of Alexandria, this lifting up 
 of the Tvarn into the Tat might prove the equivalent of 
 the idea of divine sonship, but from the Vedanta point of 
 view it means real identity, real recognition of the original 
 divine nature of man, however much hidden and disfigured 
 for a time by Avidya, or ignorance, and all its consequences. 
 With us unfortunately such questions can hardly be dis- 
 cussed in a calm philosophical spirit, because theology steps 
 in and protests against them as irreligious and blasphemous, 
 just as the Jews declared it blasphemy in Christ to teach 
 that He was equal to God, nay that He and the Father 
 were one, Tat tvam asi. If properly understood, these 
 Vedanta teachings may, though under a strange form, bring 
 us very near to the earliest Christian ^philosophy, and help 
 us to understand it, as it was understood by the great 
 thinkers of Alexandria. To maintain the eternal identity 
 of the human and the divine is very different from arrogat- 
 ing divinity for humanity ; and on this point even our 
 philosophy may have something to learn which has often 
 been forgotten in modern Christianity, though it was 
 recognised as vital by the early fathers of the Church, the 
 unity of the Father and the Son, nay, of the Father and 
 all His sons. 
 
 The teachers of the Vedanta, while striving to resuscitate 
 in man the consciousness of the identity of the Tat and one 
 Tvam, and, though indirectly, of man and God, seem to be 
 moving in the most serene atmosphere of thought, and in 
 their stiff and algebraic Sutras they were working out 
 these mighty problems with unfaltering love of truth, and 
 in an unimpassioned and truly philosophic spirit. 
 
 It is as difficult to give an idea of the form of the 
 Upanishads as of the spirit that pervades the Upanishads. 
 A few extracts, howev.er, may help to show us the early 
 Vedantists as they were, groping their way in the dark. 
 We do not indeed get there the pure wine of the Vedanta, 
 but we get the grapes from which the juice was extracted 
 and made into wine. The first is taken from the Kh&n- 
 dogya Upanishad which belongs to the Sama-veda and is 
 generally regarded as one of the earlier Upanishads l . 
 
 1 Translated in S. B. E., I, p. 92 
 
FUNDAMENTAL DOCTRINES OF THE V3DANTA. 
 
 FIRST KHA^DA. 
 
 I. $vetaketu was the son of Arami, the grandson of 
 Artma. To him his father (Uddalaka, the son of AruTia) 
 said : ' $vetaketu, go to school ; for there is none belong- 
 ing to our race, darling, who, not having studied (the Veda), 
 is, as it were, a Brahma- bandhu, i. e. a Brahmaiia by birth 
 only/ 
 
 a. Having begun his apprenticeship (with a teacher) when 
 he was twelve years of age, $vetaketu returned to his 
 father, when he was twenty-four, having then studied all 
 the Vedas, conceited, considering himself well-read, and 
 stubborn. 
 
 3. His father said to him: '/Svetaketu, as you are so 
 conceited, considering yourself well-read, and so stubborn, 
 my dear son, have you ever asked for that instruction by 
 which we hear what is not heard, by which we perceive 
 what is not perceived, by which we know what is not 
 known ? * 
 
 4. ' What is that instruction, Sir ? ' he asked. 
 
 The father replied : ' My dear son, as by one clod of clay 
 all that is made of clay is known, the difference being only 
 tae name, arising from speech, but the truth being that all 
 is clay ; 
 
 5. * And as, my dear son, by one nugget of gold all that 
 is made of ;gold is known, the difference being only the 
 name, arising from speech, but the truth being that all is 
 gold; 
 
 6. * And as, my dear son, by one pair of nail-scissors all 
 that is made of steel (K&rslmayasam) is known, the differ- 
 ence being only the name, arising from speech, but the 
 truth oeing that all is steel, thus, my dear son, is that 
 instruction/ 
 
 7. * The son said : ' Surely those venerable men (my 
 teachers) did not know that. For if they had known it, 
 why should they not have told it me ? Do you, Sir, there- 
 fore tell me that/ ' Be it so/ said the father. 
 
 SECOND ' 
 i. ' Jn the beginning, my dear son, there was that only 
 
126 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 which is (TO ov), one only, without a second. Others say, in 
 the beginning there was that only which is not (TO w ov}, 
 one only, without a second ; and from that which is not, 
 that which is, was born. 
 
 2. 'But how could it be so, my dear son? 5 the father 
 continued. How could that which is, be born of that 
 which is not ? No, my dear son, only that which is, was in 
 the beginning, one only, without a second, 
 
 3. ' it thought, may I be many, may I grow forth. It 
 sent forth fires'. 
 
 'That fire thought, may I be many, may I grow forth. 
 It sent forth water. 
 
 f And therefore whenever anybody anywhere is hot and 
 perspires, water is produced on him from fire alone. 
 
 4. ' Water thought, may I be many, may I grow forth. 
 It sent forth earth (food). 
 
 Therefore whenever it rains anywhere, most food is 
 then produced. From water alone is eatable food pro- 
 duced. 
 
 SEVENTH KHA#DA. 
 
 1. 'Man (Purusha), my son, consists of sixteen parts. 
 Abstain from food for fifteen days, but drink as much 
 water as you like, for breath comes from water, and will 
 not be cut off, if you drink water/' 
 
 2. >Svetaketii abstained from food for fifteen days. 
 Then he came to his father and said : ' What shall I say ? ' 
 The father said : ' Repeat the Rik y Ya^us, and S&man 
 verses/ He replied : ' They do not occur to me, Sir/ 
 
 3. The father said to him: 'As of a great lighted fire 
 one coal only of the size of a firefly may be left, which 
 would not burn much more than this (i.e. very little), thus, 
 my dear son, one part only of the sixteen parts (of you) is 
 left, and therefore with that one part you do not remember 
 the Vedas. Go and eat ! 
 
 4. 'Then wilt thou understand me/ Then tfvetaketu 
 ate, and afterwards approached his father. And whatever 
 his father asked him, he knew it all by heart. Then his 
 father said to him : 
 
 5. 'As of a great lighted fire one coal of the size of 
 
FUKDAMENTAL DOCTRINES OF THE VTOANTA. 127 
 
 a firefly, if left, may be made to blaze up again by putting 
 grass upon it, and will thus burn more than this, 
 
 6. * Thus, my dear son, there was one part of the sixteen 
 parts left to you, and that, lighted up with food, burnt up, 
 and by it you remember now the Vedas/ After that, he 
 understood what his father, meant when he said : ' Mind, 
 my son, comes from food, breath from water, speech from 
 lire/ He understood what he said 5 yea, he under- 
 stood ite 
 
 NINTH KEA#DA. 
 
 T. 'As the bees, my son, make honey by collecting 
 the juices of distant trees, and reduce the juice into one 
 form, 
 
 2. ' And as these juices have no discrimination, so that 
 they might say, J am the juice of this tree or that, in the 
 same manner, my son, all these creatures, when they have 
 become merged in the True (either in deep sleep or in 
 death), know not that they are merged in the True. 
 
 3. ' Whatever these creatures are here, whether a lion, or 
 a wolf, or a boar, or a worm, or a midge, or a gnat, or 
 a musquito, that they become again and again. 
 
 4. ' Now that which is that subtile essence, in it all that 
 exists has its Self. It is the Truel It is the Self, and 
 thou, O Svetaketu, art it/ 
 
 ' Please, Sir, inform me still more,' said the son. 
 * Be it so, my child/ the father replied. 
 
 TENTH KHAJVDA. 
 
 1. 'These rivers, my son, run, the eastern (like the 
 Ganga) toward the east, the western (like the Sindhu) 
 toward the west. They go from sea to sea (i. e. the clouds 
 lift up the water from the sea to the sky, and send it back 
 as rain to the sea). They become indeed sea. And as 
 those rivers, when they are in the sea, do not know, I arn 
 this or that 'river, 
 
 2. 'In the same manner, my son, all these creatures, 
 when they have come back from the True, know not that 
 they have come back from the True. Whatever these crea- 
 
128 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY, 
 
 tures are here, whether a lion, or a wolf, or a boar, or 
 a worm, or a midge, or a gnat, or a musquito, that they 
 become again and again. 
 
 3. ' That which is that subtile essence, in it all that exists 
 has its Self. It is the True. It is the Self, and thou, O 
 Svetaketu, art it.' 
 
 ' Please, Sir, inform me still more/ said the son. 
 
 * Be it so, my child/ the father replied. 
 
 ELEVENTH KHAJVDA. 
 
 1. ' If one were to strike at the root of this large tree 
 here, it would bleed, but it would live. If he were to strike 
 at its stem, it would bleed, but it would live. If he were 
 to strike at its top, it would bleed, but it would live. Per- 
 vaded by the living Self that tree stands firm, drinking in 
 its nourishment and rejoicing ; 
 
 2. ' But if the life (the living Self) leaves one of its 
 branches, that branch withers; if it leaves a second, that 
 branch withers ; if it leaves a third, that branch withers. 
 If it leaves the whole tree, the whole tree withers. In 
 exactly the same manner, my son, know this.' Thus he 
 spoke : 
 
 3. 'This (body) indeed withers and dies 'when the living 
 (Self) has left it ; the living (Self) dies not. 
 
 4 That which is that subtile essence, in it all that exists 
 has its Self. It is the True. It is the Self, and thou, 
 tfvetaketu, art it.' 
 
 ' Please, Sir, inform me still more/ said the son. 
 
 c Be it so, my child/ the father replied. 
 
 TWELFTH KHAIVDA. 
 
 i. 'Fetch me from thence a fruit of the Nyagrodha 
 tree/ 
 
 ' Here is one, Sir/ 
 
 ' Break it/ 
 
 ' It is broken, Sir/ 
 
 ' What do you see there ? ' 
 
 ' These seeds, almost infinitesimal/ 
 
IQNDAMENTAL DOCTRINES OF THE V-2DANTA. 129 
 
 * Break one of them.' 
 1 It is broken, Sir/ 
 ' What do you see there?' 
 ' Not anything, Sir/ 
 
 2. The father said : ' My son, that subtile essence which 
 you do not perceive there, of that very essence this great 
 Nyagrodha tree exists. 
 
 3. ' Believe it, my son. That which is the subtile essence, 
 in it all that exists has its Self. It is the True. It is the 
 Self, and thou, O vetaketu, art it/ 
 
 ' Please, Sir, inform me still more/ said the-son, 
 ' Be it so, my child/ the father replied. 
 
 THIRTEENTH KHA^DA. 
 
 1. ' Place this salt in water, and then wait on me in the 
 morning/ 
 
 The son did as he was commanded. 
 
 The father said to him ; * Bring me the salt, which you 
 placed in the water last night/ 
 
 The son, having looked for it, found it not, for, of course, 
 it was melted. 
 
 2. The father said: 'Taste it from the surface of the 
 water. How is it ? ' 
 
 The son replied : ' It is salt/ 
 
 ' Taste it from the middle. How is it ? ' 
 . The son replied : ' It is salt/ 
 
 ' Taste it from the bottom. How is it ? ' 
 
 The son replied : ' It is salt/ 
 
 The father said : ' Throw it away and then wait on me/ 
 
 He did so ; but the salt continued to exist. 
 
 Then the father said : ' Here a^o, in this body, indeed, 
 you do not perceive the True (Sat), my son; but there 
 indeed it is. 
 
 3. ' That which is the subtile essence, in it all that exists 
 has its Self. It is the True. It is the Self, and thou, 
 O tfvetaketu, art it/ 
 
 ' Please, Sir, inform me still more/ said the son. 
 ' Be it so, my child/ the father replied. 
 : 9 K 
 
130 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 FOURTEENTH KIUJTOA. 
 
 1. ' As one might lead a person with his eyes covered 
 away from the Gandharas, and leave him then in a place 
 where there are no human beings; and as that person 
 would turn towards the east, or the north, or the west, and 
 shout, " I have been brought here with my eyes covered, 
 I have been left here with my eyes covered," 
 
 2. c And as thereupon some one might loose his bandage 
 and say to him, " Go in that direction, it is the Gandharas, 
 go in that direction ; " and as thereupon, having been in- 
 formed and being able to judge for himself, he would by 
 asking his way from village to village arrive at last at the 
 Gandharas, in exactly the same manner does a man, who 
 meets with a teacher to inform him, learn that there is 
 delay so long only as " I am not delivered (from this body) ; 
 and then I shall be perfect/' 
 
 3. * That which is the subtile essence in it all that exists 
 has its Self. It is the True. It is the Self, and thou, 
 O A^vetaketu, art it/ 
 
 ' Please, Sir, inform me still more/ said the son, 
 ' Be it so, my cliild/ the father replied. 
 
 FIFTEENTH KHAATDA. 
 
 1. 'If a man is ill, his relatives assemble round him and 
 ask : " Dost thou know me ? Dost thou know me ? " Then, 
 as long as his speech is not merged in his mind, his mind 
 in breath, breath in heat (fire), heat in the Highest Being 
 (Devata), he knows them. 
 
 2. ' But when his speech is merged in his mind, his mind 
 in breath, breath in heat (fire), heat in the Highest Being, 
 then he knows them not. 
 
 ' That which is the subtile essence, in it all that exists 
 has its Self. It is the True. It is the Self, and thou, O 
 $vetaketu, art it/ 
 
 ' Please, Sir, inform me still more/ said the son. 
 
 ' Be it so, my child/ the father replied. 
 
 The next extract is from the KatfAa Upanishad of the 
 
F TNDAMJBNTAL DOCTRINES OF THE YZDANTA. 
 
 Ya#ur-veda, and has by many scholars been classed as of 
 later date. 
 
 FIRST VALL!. 
 
 i. Va^asravasa, desirous (of heavenly rewards), surren- 
 dered (at a sacrifice) all that he possessed. He had a son of 
 the name of Na&iketas. 
 
 4. He (knowing that his father had promised to give up 
 at a sacrifice all that he possessed, and therefore his son 
 also) said to his father : ' Dear father, to whom wilt thou 
 give me ? ' 
 
 He said it a second and a third time. Then the father 
 replied (angrily) : 
 
 ' I shall give thee unto Death/ 
 
 (The father, having once said so, though iu haste, had to 
 be true to his word and to sacrifice his son.) 
 
 5. The son said : ' I go as the first, at the head of many 
 (who have still to die) ; I go in the midst of many (who 
 are now dying). What will be the work of Yama (the 
 ruler of the departed) which to-day he has to do unto me ? 
 
 6. * Look back how it was with those who came before, 
 look forward how it will be with those who come here- 
 after, A mortal ripens like corn, like corn he springs up 
 again/ 
 
 (NaMketas then enters into the abode of Yama Vaivas- 
 vata, and there is no one to receive him. Thereupon one 
 of the attendants of Yama is supposed to say :) 
 
 7. < Fire enters into the houses, when a Brahmawa enters 
 as*a guest. That fire is quenched by this peace-offering; 
 bring, water, O Vaivasvata ! 
 
 8. 'A Brahmaria that dwells in the house of a foolish 
 man without receiving food to eat, destroys his hopes and 
 expectations, his possessions, his righteousness, his sacred 
 and his good deeds, and all his sons and cattle/ 
 
 (Yama, returning to his house after an absence of three 
 nights, during which time Na&iketas had received no hos- 
 pitality from him, says :) 
 
 9. ' O BrahmaTia, as thou, a venerable guest, hast dwelt 
 in my house three nights without eating, therefore choose 
 now three boons. Hail to thee ! and welfare to me i ' 
 
 K 2 
 
132 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 10. Na/dketas said : ' Death, as the first of tlie three 
 boons I choose that Gautama, my father, be pacified, kind, 
 and free from anger towards me ; and that he may know 
 me and greet me, when I shall have been dismissed by thee/ 
 
 11. Yama said: 'With my leave, Audd&laki Armu, thy 
 father, will know thee, and be again towards thee as he 
 was before. He shall sleep peacefully through the night, 
 and free from anger, after having seen thee freed from the 
 jaws of death/ 
 
 12. Na/dketas said: 'In the heaven- world there is no 
 fear ; thou art not there, O Death; and no one is afraid on 
 account of old age. Leaving behind both hunger and thirst, 
 and out of the reach of sorrow, all rejoice in the world of 
 heaven/ 
 
 13. ' Thou knowest, O Death, the fire-sacrifice which leads 
 us to heaven ; tell it to me, for I am full of faith. Those 
 who live in the heaven-world reach immortality, this I 
 ask as my second boon/ 
 
 14. Yama said: 'I will tell it thee, learn it from me, 
 and when thou understandest that fire-sacrifice which 
 leads to heaven, know, O Naiiketas, that it is the attain- 
 ment of the eternal worlds, and their firm support, hidden 
 in darkness/ 
 
 15. Yama then told him that fire-sacrifice, in the begin- 
 ning of the worlds, and whafT bricks* are required for the 
 altar, and how many, and how they are to be placed. And 
 Na/dketas repeated all as it had been told to him. Then 
 Mrityu, being pleased with him, said again : 
 
 19. 'This, O Nafciketas, is thy fire which leads to heaven, 
 and which thou hast chosen as thy second boon. That fire 
 all men will proclaim as thine. Choose now, O Na&iketas, 
 thy third boon/ ' 
 
 20. NaAdketas said: 'JThere is that doubt, when a man 
 is dead, some saying, he is; others, he is not. This I 
 should like to know, taught by thee ; this is the third of 
 my boons/ 
 
 2,1. Death said: 'On this point even the gods have been 
 in doubt formerly; it is not easy to understand. That 
 subject is subtle. Choose another boon, O Na&iketas, do 
 not press me, and let me off that boon/ 
 
FUNDAMENTAL DOCTRINES OF THE VEDANTA 133 
 
 22. Na/dketas said : ' On this point even the gods have 
 been in doubt indeed, and thou, Death, hast declared it 
 to be not easy to understand, and another teacher like 
 thee is not to be found : surely no other boon is like unto 
 this/ 
 
 23. Death said : c Choose sons and grandsons who shall 
 live a hundred years, herds of cattle, elephants, gold, and 
 horses. Choose the wide abode of the earth, and live 
 thyself as many harvests as thou desirest.' 
 
 24. ' If thou canst think of any boon equal to that, choose 
 wealth, and long life. Be (king), Na&iketas, on the wide 
 earth. I make thee the enjoy er of all desires/ 
 
 25. 'Whatever desires are difficult to attain among 
 mortals, ask for them according to thy wish; these fair 
 maidens with their chariots and musical instruments, 
 such are indeed not to be obtained by men, be waited 
 on by them whom I give to thee, but do not ask me about 
 dying/ 
 
 26. Na&iketas said : ' Thoughts of to-morrow, O Death, 
 wear out the present vigour of all the senses of man. Even 
 the whole of life is short. Keep thou thy horses, keep 
 dance and song for thyself/ 
 
 27. 'No man can be made happy through wealth. Shall 
 we have wealth, when we see thee ? Let us live, as long 
 as thou rulest? Only that boon (which I have chosen) is 
 to be chosen by me/ 
 
 28. ' What mortal, slowly decaying here below, and 
 knowing, after having approached them, the freedom from 
 decay enjoyed by the immortals, would delight in a long 
 life, after he has pondered on the pleasures which arise 
 from beauty and love ? ' 
 
 29. ' No, that on which there is this doubt, O Death, tell 
 us what there is in that great. Hereafter. Na&iketas does 
 not choose another boon but that which enters into what 
 is hidden/ 
 
 SECOND VALL! 
 
 j. Death said: 'The good is one thing, the pleasant 
 another ; these two, having different objects, chain a man. 
 
134 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY, 
 
 It is well with him who clings to the good ; he who 
 chooses the pleasant, misses his end/ 
 
 3. ' The good and the pleasant approach man : the wise 
 goes round about them and distinguishes them. Yea, the 
 wise prefers the good to the pleasant, but the fool chooses 
 the pleasant through greed and avarice/ 
 
 3. 'Thou,0 Na&iketas, after pondering all pleasures that 
 are or seem delightful, hast dismissed them all. Thou hast 
 not gone into the road that leadeth to wealth, in which 
 many men perish/ 
 
 4. ' Wide apart and leading to different points are these 
 two, ignorance, and what is known as wisdom. I believe 
 NaAdketas to be one who desires knowledge, for even many 
 pleasures did not tear thee away/ 
 
 5. 'Fools dwelling in darkness, wise in their 'own con- 
 ceit, and puffed up with vain knowledge, go round and 
 round, staggering to and fro, like blind men led by the 
 blind/ 
 
 6. * The Hereafter never rises before the eyes of the care- 
 less child, deluded by the delusion of wealth. " This is the 
 world," he thinks, " there is no other ; " thus he falls again 
 and again under iny sway/ 
 
 7. * He (the Self) of whom many are not even able to 
 hear, whom many, even when they hear of him, do not 
 comprehend ; wonderful is a man, when found, who is able 
 to teach this (the Self) ; wonderful is he who comprehends 
 this, when taught by an able teacher/ 
 
 9. 'That doctrine is not to be obtained by argument, but 
 when it is declared by another, then, O dearest, it is easy 
 to understand. Thou hast obtained it now ; thou art truly 
 a man of true resolve. May we have always an inquirer 
 like thee!' 
 
 10. Na&iketas said : 'I know that what is called treasure 
 is transient, for the eternal is not obtained by things 
 which are not eternal. Hence the Na/ciketa fire-sacrifice 
 has been laid by me first; then, by means of transient 
 things, I have obtained what is not transient (the teaching 
 of Yama)/ 
 
 11. Yaina said: 'Though thou hadst seen the fulfilment 
 of all desires, the foundation of the world, the endless 
 
FUNDAMENTAL DOCTRINES OP THE YEDANTA 135 
 
 rewards of good deeds, the shore where there is no fear, 
 that which is magnified by praise, the wide abode, the 
 rest, yet being wise thou hast with firm resolve dismissed 
 it all/ 
 
 1 2. ' The wise who, by means of meditation on his Self, 
 recognises the Ancient, who is difficult to be seen, who has 
 entered into darkness, who is hidden in the cave, who 
 dwells in the abyss, as God, he indeed leaves joy and sorrow 
 far behind/ 
 
 13. * A mortal who has heard this and embraced it, who 
 has removed from it all qualities, and has thus reached 
 that subtle Being, rejoices, because he has obtained what is 
 a cause for rejoicing. The house (of Brahman) is open, 
 I believe, O Na&iketas/ 
 
 1 8. ' The knowing Self is not born, it dies not ; it sprang 
 from nothing, nothing sprang from it. The Ancient is 
 unborn, eternal, everlasting; he is not killed, though the 
 body is killed/ 
 
 19. 'If the killer thinks that he kills, if the killed thinks 
 that he is killed, they do not understand ; for this one does 
 not kill, nor is that one killed/ 
 
 2,0. ( The Self, smaller than small, greater than great, is 
 hidden in the heart of the creature. A man who is free 
 from desires and free from grief, sees the majesty of the 
 Self by the grace of the Creator (or through the serenity 
 of the elements)/ 
 
 31. * Though sitting still, he walks far; though lying 
 down, he goes everywhere. Who, save myself, is able to 
 know that God, who rejoices and rejoices noil ' 
 
 22. ' The wise who knows the Self as bodiless within the 
 bodies, as unchanging among changing things, as great and 
 omnipresent, he never grieves/ 
 
 23. 'That Self cannot be gained by the Veda, nor by 
 understanding, nor by much learning. He whom the Self 
 chooses, by him the Self can be gained. The Self chooses 
 him (his body) as his own/ 
 
 24. ' But he who has not first turned away from his 
 wickedness, who is not tranquil, and subdued, or whose 
 mind is not at rest, he can never obtain the Self (even) by 
 knowledge/ 
 
INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 THIRD VALL! 
 
 1. 'There are the two, drinking their reward in the 
 world of their own works, entered into the cave (of the 
 heart), dwelling on the highest summit (the ether in 
 the heart). Those who know Brahman call them shade 
 and light; likewise, those householders who perform the 
 TriTi^iketa sacrifice.' 
 
 2. * May we be able to master that Na&iketa rite which 
 is a bridge for sacrificers ; which is the highest, imperish- 
 able Brahman for those who wish to cross over to the 
 fearless shore/ 
 
 3. ' Know the Self to be sitting in the chariot, the body 
 to be the chariot, the intellect (buddhi) the charioteer, and 
 the inind the reins/ 
 
 4. 'The senses they call the horses, the objects of the 
 senses their roads. When he (the Highest Self) is in union 
 with the body, the senses, and the mind, then wise people 
 call him the Enjoy er/ 
 
 5. ' He who has no understanding and whose mind (the 
 reins) is never firmly held, his senses (horses) are unman- 
 ageable, like vicious horses of a charioteer/ 
 
 6. ' But he who has understanding and whose mind is 
 always firmly held, his senses are under control, like good 
 horses of a charioteer/ 
 
 7. ' He who has no understanding, who is unmindful and 
 always impure, never reaches that place, but enters into the 
 round of births/ 
 
 8. * But he who has understanding, who is mindful and 
 always pure, reaches indeed that place, from whence he is 
 not born again/ 
 
 9. 'But he who has understanding for his charioteer, 
 and who holds the reins of the mind, he reaches the end 
 of his journey, and that is the highest place (step) of 
 Vishnu/ 
 
 10. ' Beyond the senses there are the objects, beyond the 
 objects there is the mind, beyond the mind there is the 
 intellect, the Great Self is beyond the intellect/ 
 
 ii.' Beyond the Great there is the Undeveloped, beyond 
 the Undeveloped there is the Person '(Purusha). Beyond 
 
TRANSLATION OF THE UPANISHAOS. 137 
 
 the Person there is nothing this is the goal, the furthest 
 road/ 
 
 12. 'ifhat Self is hidden in all beings and does not shine 
 forth, but it is seen by subtle seers through their sharp and 
 subtle intellect/ 
 
 13. 'A wise man should keep down speech and mind ; he 
 should keep them within the Self which is knowledge; 
 he should keep knowledge within the Self which is the 
 Great ; and he should keep that (the Great) within the Self 
 which is the Quiet/ 
 
 14. 'Rise, awake! having obtained your boons, under- 
 stand them ! The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass 
 over ; difficult is the path (to the Self) ; the wise tell it/ 
 
 15. ' He who hS perceived that which is without sound, 
 without touch, without form, without decay, without taste, 
 eternal, without smell, without beginning, without end, 
 beyond the Great, and unchangeable, is freed from the jaws 
 of death/ 
 
 Translation of the Upaniahads. 
 
 May I be allowed to say here a few words with regard 
 to my translation. Those who know my translation of the 
 Upanishads, published in 1879 and 18(84, will easily see that 
 I have altered it in several places. But I do not wish it to 
 be understood that I consider my translation even now as 
 quite free from doubt. Our best scholars know how far we 
 are still from a perfect understanding of the Upanishads. 
 When therefore, in 1879, I undertook a translation of all 
 the more important Upanishads, all I could hope for was 
 to give a better translation than what we had before. 
 Though I was well aware of the difficulties of such an 
 undertaking, I knew that I could count on the same in- 
 dulgence which is always granted to a first attempt at 
 translating, nay, often, as in our case, at guessing and 
 deciphering an ancient text. Nor have I been at all con- 
 vinced that I was wrong in following a text, such as it is 
 presupposed by the commentaries of $a??ikara, instead of 
 introducing conjectural emendations ; however obvious they 
 seem to be. Scholars should learn that the more obvious 
 their emendations are, the more difficult it becomes to 
 
138 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY, 
 
 account for the introduction of such palpable corruptions 
 into an ancient text, such as it was at the time of &amkara, 
 My determination also, whenever it was impossible to dis- 
 cover a satisfactory meaning, to be satisfied with /Samkara's 
 interpretations, who after all lived a thousand years ago, 
 may be criticised, and I never represented it as more than 
 a pis aller. Besides that, all the translators of the S. B. E. 
 had to make a sacrifice in giving what they could give at 
 the time, without waiting for the ninth year. Though 
 I have hardly ever referred to the mistakes made by earlier 
 translators of the Upanishads, but have simply corrected 
 them, anybody who will take the trouble to compare them 
 with my own will find a good harvest of them, as those 
 who come after me will no doubt glean many a stray ear 
 even in a field which so many mowers have mowed. But 
 the work of the children who glean some ears is very 
 different from that of the mower who has to mow a whole 
 field alone. Such a work as Colonel Jacob's Concordance 
 of the Principal Upanishads and the Bhagavad-gita, pub- 
 lished in 1891, has placed at the disposal of all Vedantic 
 students what may almost be called a mowing machine in 
 place of a sickle; and the careful and brilliant translation 
 of the Sixty Upanishads published by Professor Deussen, 
 in 1897, shows what an immense jadvance has been made 
 with its help. I have adopted many emendations, in the 
 extracts given above, from Professor Deussen's work, and 
 when my translations differ from his, all I can say is that 
 I always differ most reluctantly from one who has devoted 
 so many years to Vedantic studies, and whose mind is so 
 thoroughly imbued with Vedantic ideas. If we could 
 always know at what time each Upanishad was finally 
 settled and reduced to writing, whether before or after the 
 time when the Vediinta and Stt9?ikhya-philosophy assumed 
 each its own independent and systematic form, our task 
 would be much lightened. Whenever we come across such 
 words as Atrnan and Brahman we suspect Vedantic in- 
 fluences, whereas Purusha and Prakriti at once remind us 
 of Samkhya doctrines. But Atman is by no means un- 
 known to early S&mkhya philosophers, nor is Purusha 
 entirely outside the Vedantic horizon. To say, therefore. 
 
CHARACTER OF THE UPANISHAL3. 1.39 
 
 that Purusha must always be taken in the technical 
 Samkhya sense, and Atman in that of the Vedanta, is 
 going too far, at least at present. We go still further out 
 of our depth if we maintain, with regard to the KaAa 
 Upanishad, for instance, that there was a time when it 
 consisted of one chapter and three Vallis only. It may 
 have been so, and who shall prove that it was not so ? 
 But on the other hand, what do we know of the compilers 
 of the Upanishads to enable us to speak so positively on 
 such a subject? Everybody can see that there was a divi- 
 sion at III, 13, or 1 6, or 17. The technical repetition of 
 certain words in IV, 17 might indicate that the Upanishad 
 originally ended there, and that V, 18 is later. Anybody 
 can see also that the second Adhyaya differs in spirit from 
 the first. The name of Na/dketas, for instance, is never 
 mentioned in the second chapter, except in the last and 
 probably spurious or additional verse, and then it appears 
 as N&fciketa, as derived from NaHketa, not from the old 
 form Na/ciketas. We may easily discover a different spirit 
 in the third, as compared with the first and second Valli. 
 In fact, there is still plenty of work left for those who 
 come after us, for with all that has been achieved we are 
 on the threshold only of a truly historical study of Indian 
 philosophy and literature. Here, also, we are still like 
 children playing on the sea-shore and finding now and 
 then a pebble or a shell, whilst the great ocean of that 
 ancient literature lies before us undiscovered and unex- 
 plored. 
 
 Character of the Upanishads. 
 
 Such utterances as I have here quoted from the Upani- 
 shads will hardly seem worthy of the name of philosophy. 
 It would have been almost impossible to describe them so 
 as to give a clear idea of what the Upanishads really are. 
 With us philosophy always means something systematic, 
 while what we find here are philosophic rhapsodies rather 
 than consecutive treatises. But that is the very reason 
 why the Upanishads are so interesting to the historical 
 student. Nowhere, except in India, can we watch that 
 period of chaotic thought, half poetical, half religious, 
 
140 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 which preceded, in India at least, the age of philosophy, 
 properly so called. Possibly, if we knew more of the utter- 
 ances of such men as Heraclitus or Epimenides in Greece, 
 they might show some likeness to the outpourings of the 
 authors of the Upanishads. What is quite clear, however, 
 is that the systematic philosophy of India would be per- 
 fectly unintelligible without the previous chapter of the 
 Upanishads. And however unsystematic these relics of 
 the childhood of philosophy may seem, there is really more 
 system in them than appears at first sight. They contain 
 a number even of technical terms which show that the 
 Upanishads did not spring up in one day, and that there 
 must have been a good deal of philosophical controversy 
 during the age that is recorded to us in the Upanishads. 
 If /Svetaketu is represented as attending the schools of 
 famous teachers till he is twenty-four years of age, and is 
 then only learning from his father the highest wisdom, we 
 see that that highest wisdom had already been fully elabo- 
 rated in the formula of ' Tat tvam asi,' ' Thou art that/ that 
 is, thou, man, art not different from that divine nature which 
 pervades the whole world, as salt pervades the sea. You 
 cannot see it, you cannot handle it, but you can taste it and 
 know that, though invisible, it is there. That divine essence, 
 that which is alone true and real in this unreal or pheno- 
 menal world, is present likewise, though invisible, as the 
 germ of life in the smallest seed, and without it there would 
 be no seed, no fruit, no tree, as without God there would 
 be no world. That this ancient wisdom should be so often 
 mixed up with what seems to us childish and absurd, is as 
 true as it is difficult to explain, but we must remember that 
 a long continued oral tradition must naturally leave 'a wide 
 door open to additions of every kind. 
 
 Whatever we may think of these Upanishads, it cannot 
 be doubted that they represent the soil which contained 
 the seeds of philosophy which sprang up and had their full 
 growth in the great systems of philosophy of a later age. 
 
 Ved&nta-Sfltras. 
 
 If now we turn to these, and first of all, to the philosophy 
 
VEDANTA-SUTRAS 141 
 
 elaborated by BadarayaTia, we find no longer rhapsodies, but 
 a carefully reasoned system, contained in 555 short para- 
 graphs, the so-called Ved&nta-Sutras. We read there in 
 the first Sutra and as a kind of title, ' Now then a desire 
 to know Brahman/ or as Deussen translates 6?i/7/<asa, ' Now 
 then research of Brahman/ The two words Atha and Ata/i 
 which, I believe, were originally no more than introductory, 
 and which occur again and again at the beginning of San- 
 skrit works, always give rise to endless and most fanciful 
 interpretations. If we must assign to them any special 
 meaning, it seems to me best to take Atha in the sense of 
 Now, and AtaA in the sense of Then or Therefore, implying 
 thereby that the student has fulfilled certain preliminary 
 conditions, such as Upanayana, reception by a teacher, 
 Vedadhyayana, learning by heart the text of the Veda, 
 including the TJpanishads, and that he is therefore likely 
 to feel a desire to understand the Veda and to know Brah- 
 man. It may be true also, as some commentators maintain, 
 that in real life the first step would have been to study the 
 Pftrva-Mimams&, or what is called Dharma, law, virtue, &c ; 
 and that only after having gained a knowledge of Dharma, 
 particularly of the sacrificial Dharma, would there arise 
 a desire to know Brahman. In that case the Mimamsa 
 might be looked upon as one body, the Purva-Mimamsa 
 forming the; first, the Uttara-MimstrasS, the second part, 
 and we should have to consider the practice of virtue and 
 the performance of sacrificial acts as a necessary prelimi- 
 nary to a study of the Ved&nta-philosophy, or, as it is 
 generally expressed, we should have to consider works as 
 essential for producing that purity and serenity of the 
 mind without which a knowledge of Brahman is impos- 
 sible. I confess I- doubt whether all this was present to 
 the mind of Badar&yaTia. He may have used Crigwasa, 
 wish to know, instead of ViMra, research or discussion, on 
 purpose, because in the true sense Brahman cannot be de- 
 fined or known. But although Brahman cannot be known 
 like all other things, by being defined as So and So, it can 
 be explained negatively as Not so and Not so, and can thus 
 be cleared from many doubts which arise from the various 
 utterances about it in the Upanishads. When we read 
 
142 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 however, that food is Brahman l , that Manas is Brahman 2 , 
 that Vi#/7ana is Brahman 3 , that the sun is Brahman 4 , nay 
 that NarayaTia is Brahman 5 , there is surely room enough 
 for trying to determine what Brahman really is, or at least 
 what he or it was to Badarayana and his predecessors. 
 
 The best answer, however, to all these questions is that 
 given in the next Sutra, ' That from which the origin frc. 
 (origin, subsistence, and dissolution) of this world proceed V 
 The full sense of this Sutra, according to the commentator, 
 is : ' That omniscient, omnipotent cause from which proceed 
 the origin, subsistence and dissolution of the world, which 
 world is differentiated by names and forms, contains many 
 agents and enjoyers, and is the abode of fruits or effects, 
 caused by v former actions, these fruits having their definite 
 places, times and causes, and the nature of whose arrange- 
 ment cannot be conceived by the mind that cause is 
 Brahman/ 
 
 If it be asked, how this is known, the commentator in- 
 sists very strongly that such knowledge is not to be gained 
 by sense perception or by inference, but simply by the Veda 
 (Upanishads), passages of which have been collected and 
 properly arranged in the Sfitras. If in some places he 
 admits as a second source of knowledge Sakshatkara, or 
 manifestation, that can only be meant for intuition, but, 
 strictly speaking, such intuition also presupposes a previous 
 working of the organs of sensuous perception, while the 
 object of such Sakshatkara, i.e. Brahman, can at first be 
 supplied by the Veda only. In support therefore of our 
 Sfttra which is intended to give a general idea of Brahman, 
 a passage is quoted from the Taitt. Up. Ill, i, where Varuna 
 explains to his son that 'that frprn which these beings are 
 born, that by which, when born, they live, that into which 
 at their death they re-enter, try to know that, that is 
 Brahman/ 
 
 JMnd. Up. VII, 7, 9, a ; Brih. Ar. V, la, I. 
 
 X/iand. Up. Ill, 18, i ; VII, 3, a ; Brih. Ar. IV, i, 6. 
 
 tfMnd. Up. VII, 7, a. 
 
 Kh&nd. Up. Ill, 19, i ; Brih. Up. II, i, a. 
 
 Mahan&r. Up. XI, 4. 
 
 The words which actually occur in the Sutra are printed in italics, 
 to give an idea of the enigmatical style of the Sutras, and their utter 
 uselessness without a commentary. 
 
APPEALS TO THE VEDA. PRAMAJV.\S. 143 
 
 Appeals to the Veda. 
 
 And here we should mark a curious feature of orthodox 
 Indian philosophy. Though the Vedanta appeals to the. 
 Veda, it appeals to it, not as having itself grown out of it 
 or as belonging to it, but rather as an independent witness, 
 looking back to it for sanction and confirmation. The same 
 applies, though in a less degree, to other systems also. 
 They all speak as if they had for several generations ela- 
 borated their doctrines independently, and, after they had 
 done so, they seem to come back to get the approval of the 
 Veda, or to establish their conformity with the Veda, as 
 the recognised highest authority. This shows that a cer- 
 tain time must have elapsed after the final redaction of the 
 Upanishads and the return, as it were, of their offspring, 
 the StHras, to their original home. How this came about, 
 we cannot tell, because we have no historical documents, 
 but that there had been something very important inter- 
 vening between the old Upanishads and the first attempts 
 at systematising Vedanta and Samkhya doctrines in the 
 form of Sutras is very clear by the manner in which the 
 Sutras appeal to the Veda. This constant appeal to 
 the Veda as the highest authority was justified by the 
 most elaborate arguments, as part of the question, How do 
 we know ? a question which forms an essential preliminary 
 to all philosophy in India. 
 
 Pramanas. 
 
 We saw how the jfiT&rvakas admitted but one source of 
 knowledge, the evidence of the senses, excluding all others. 
 How they defended that sensuous knowledge against the 
 uncertainties inherent in it, we do not know, because we 
 do not possess those S&tras. But it is characteristic of the 
 Vedanta-Sfttras, that they pay much smaller attention to 
 the Pram-mas, the sources and authorities of knowledge, 
 than the other systems. These questions of Prama7*a are 
 often referred to in the commentaries, but not so much in 
 the text. Pramawa is originally the instrument of measur- 
 ing, from Ma, to measure, and Pra, forth. It may be 
 translated by measure, standard, authority, and survives 
 in the modern Persian Ferm&n, an authoritative order. 
 
144 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Prama??as according to the Sawkhya. 
 
 The PramstTia which serves as a means (S&dhana) of 
 determining, produces Pramiti, accurate knowledge, just as 
 a SMhana (means) produces Siddhi, truth or certainty. 
 When we come to the Samkhya, we shall find there a very 
 full and perhaps the oldest description of the three essen- 
 tial Pramawas, viz, Pratyaksha, Anumana, and $abda. 
 The first PramaTta, Pratyaksha,, is what we mean by 
 sensuous perception, though it is also used in the sense of 
 what can be perceived by the senses, the Drishta,, i.e. 
 what is seen. It is explained (SUmkhya-Sfttra I, 89) as 
 cognition which arises from contact (with objects) and 
 represents their form. 
 
 Pratyaksha, 
 
 It is generally explained by Indriyartha-samnikarsha, 
 contact of the senses and their respective objects, and is 
 said to involve really three stages, contact of the sense- 
 organ with its object, and at the same time union of the 
 sense with Manas, mind, and union of Manas, mind, witli 
 Atman, Self. There is a distinction made between two 
 kinds of Pratyaksha, called Savikalpa and Nirvikalpa, 
 with doubt and without doubt. The former seems to con- 
 sist in our seeing an object, and then declaring that it is 
 this or thai ; the latter in simply accepting a thing such as 
 it is, without any previous idea of it, such as when we 
 awake from sleep, see a tiger, and at once run away. 
 Each sense working by itself, and on its own objects only, 
 is the Asadhara7iakara?m, the special or exclusive instru- 
 ment of the knowledge conveyed by it. Sound, for 
 instance, is heard by the ear only, and is conveyed by 
 Akasa or ether. But not every sound is brought 
 into immediate contact with the ear; it is transmitted 
 through the ether, as we are told, by means of waves 
 (Vi/dta), so that we may perceive the beating of a 
 distant drum, one wave propelling the other across 
 the vast ocean of ether, till it strikes the shore, i.e. the 
 ear. 
 
ANUMANA. SABDA. 145 
 
 Amxxnflina. 
 
 The next Pramlbia is Anumana or inference, which is 
 explained (1. c. ? I, 100) as knowledge of the* connected on 
 the part of one who knows the connection, or as knowledge 
 of something that is not perceptible, but is known as being 
 invariably connected (VVapya) with something else that is 
 perceived, as when we perceive fire (Vyapaka) from per- 
 ceiving smoke (Vyapta); This is a very imperfect descrip- 
 tion of Anumana, which will be more fully explained 
 hereafter, but it suffices for our present purpose. As an 
 illustration, we have the common i llustration that we know 
 the presence of fire when we see smoke, and that we know 
 the absence of smoke when we see no fire, always supposing 
 that fire has been proved to be the Vyapaka or the sine qud 
 non of smoke. 
 
 $abda (I, 101) or word, another Pramaw a, is explained 
 to be instruction given by one that can be trusted (Apto- 
 padesa) ; this one that can be trusted being for the Ved&n- 
 tists the Veda, but for the Samkhya and other systems, 
 any other person also endowed with authority and there- 
 fore considered as trustworthy. It might easily be shown 
 that these three Prama/rcas all go back to one, the Pra- 
 tyaksha, because the invariable concomitance between 
 smoke and fire and the like, on which the Anumana rests, 
 can have been established by sensuous experience only; 
 and the trustworthiness of any knowledge conveyed by 
 word must equally depend on experience, or on acquaint- 
 ance with the person who is or is not to be trusted. 
 
 The question is, whether this $abda, word, was originally 
 taken to signify the Veda such as we possess it \ I have 
 elsewhere given my reasons for believing that $abda had 
 really a far more general and more philosophical meaning, 
 and that it may have been intended at first for Brahman, 
 the Word, or for verbal knowledge as is conveyed by 
 a word. The Hindus knew quite well that words such as 
 greatness! goodness, nay, also such as animal, plant, metal, 
 
 1 Sarokhya-Philosophie, p. 154, Anm. 3. That the connection between 
 sound and meaning, and therefore the authority of words by themselves, 
 occupied the Sawkhyas, we see from Sutra V, 37. 
 
 10 L 
 
146 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 nay, even dog or cow, convey knowledge that cannot be 
 gained either by perception or by inference alone, but only 
 by the word. The same applies to Aptava/cana, another 
 term for &abda, word, used in the Samkhya-philosophy, 
 Apta, which is explained by Yogya, can hardly be trans- 
 lated by aptus. It means what has been obtained or 
 received, and Aptavftkya or Aptavafcana need originally 
 have meant no more than our traditional language such 
 as it is, though it was explained afterwards as meaning the 
 word of a person worthy . of confidence, or even of a book 
 believed in by the world at large. However, we must be 
 satisfied with what the Samkhya philosophers tell us ; and 
 there can be no doubt that the followers of the orthodox 
 Samkhya understood $abda in the sense of Veda ; though, 
 considering that they admitted a divine, not a human 
 origin of the Veda, it is difficult to understand how they 
 could afterwards take it in the general sense of the word 
 of one that can be trusted. The important question for 
 us to consider is what other systems of philosophy have 
 made of these three PramaTias. The Sfttras of all the 
 other systems of philosophy are well acquainted with them, 
 and they are even referred to by the commentators of the 
 Vedanta also. It seems strange at first sight, considering 
 that the question of the possibility of knowing, and of the 
 instruments of knowledge, forms the foundation of every 
 true system of philosophy, that the Brahma-Sfttras, though 
 not the later Vedanta works, should apparently have 
 attached so little importance to what may be called their 
 Critique of Pure Reason. This would seem indeed to lower 
 the Vedanta-philosophy to the level of all Pre- Kantian 
 philosophy, but a little reflection will show us that there 
 was in the Vedanta a sufficient excuse for this neglect. 
 What at first sight makes the case still worse is that while 
 Pratyaksha, perception, and Anumana, inference, are 
 ignored, the only evidence invoked by Badarayana is 
 $ruti or revelation, which, as we saw, was often invoked 
 by the modern orthodox S&mkhyas under the name of 
 $abda -or word. To most philosophers revelation would 
 seem a very weak instrument of knowledge, and one that 
 could never claim more than a subordinate place, even if 
 
SABDA. 147 
 
 treated as a subdivision of Anumana or inference. But we 
 must remember that it is the highest object of the Vedanta 
 to prove that there is only one true reality, namely Brahman, 
 and that the manifoldness of the visible world is but the 
 result of that nescience which the Vedanta is meant to 
 destroy. It will then become intelligible why an appeal 
 to the evidence of the senses or to inference would have 
 been out of place and almost self-contradictory in the 
 Vedanta. The commentator admits this when he says, * If 
 we acquiesce in the doctrine of absolute unity (Brahman), 
 the ordinary means of right knowledge, perception, &c., 
 become invalid, because the absence of manifoldness deprives 
 them of their objects/ Hoiice, a doctrine which undertakes 
 to prove that the manifold world, presented to us by the 
 senses, is unreal, could not well appeal at the same time to 
 the evidence of the senses, nor to inference which is founded 
 on it, in support of truth or right knowledge, though it may 
 and does readily acknowledge their importance for all the 
 ordinary transactions of life. Thus &amkara continues: 
 ' So long as a person has not reached the true knowledge 
 of the unity of the Self, it does not enter his mind that the 
 world of effects, with its instruments and objects of right 
 knowledge and its results of actions, is untrue ; and hence, 
 as long as true knowledge does not present itself, there is 
 no reason why the ordinary course of secular and religious 
 activity should not go on undisturbed.' 
 
 How well BadarayaTia must have been acquainted with 
 the ordinary evidences of knowledge, both Pratyaksha and 
 Anumana, is best shown by the new meaning which he 
 assigns to them, applying (I, 3, 28) Pratyaksha to $ruti 
 (revelation) and Anumana to Smriti (tradition), the Veda 
 being to him self-evident, while other works, such as the 
 Law-books of Manu, the Mahabharata (Bhagavad-gita), nay 
 even the Samkhya and Yoga systems (IV, a, 21), being 
 Smriti, are true in so far only as they are not in opposition 
 to the Veda. But everything else, every kind of Tarka or 
 speculation, is excluded when the fundamental truths of 
 the Vedanta are at stake. Thus $a??ikara, II, i, u, says: 
 ' In matters to be known from $r ( uti mere reasoning is riot 
 to be relied on. As the thoughts of man are altogether 
 
 L 2 
 
148 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 unfettered, reasoning, which disregards the holy texts and 
 rests on individual opinion only, has no proper foundation. 
 One sees how arguments which some clever men had ex- 
 cogitated with great pains, are shown by people still more 
 ingenious to be fallacious, and how the arguments of the 
 latter are refuted in their turn by other men ; so that on 
 account of the diversity of men's opinions, it is impossible 
 to accept mere reasoning as having a sure fouiidatioiL 
 Nor can we get over this difficulty by accepting as well 
 founded the reasoning of some person of recognised 
 eminence, whether Kapila or any one else, since we observe 
 that even men of the most undoubted intellectual eminence, 
 such as Kapila, Ka?i&da, and other founders of philosophical 
 schools, have contradicted each other/ 
 
 This rejection of reason and reasoning, though not un- 
 familiar to ourselves, seems certainly strange in a philo- 
 sopher ; and it is not unnatural that $amkara should have 
 been taunted by his adversaries with using reason against 
 reasoning. 'You cannot/ they say, 'maintain that no 
 reasoning whatever is well -founded, for you yourself can 
 found your assertion that reasoning has no foundation on 
 reasoning only. Moreover, if all reasoning were unfounded, 
 the whole course of practical human life would have to 
 come to an end/ But even this does not frighten .$amkara. 
 As all reasoning is admittedly founded on perception and 
 inference, he replies, 'that although with regard to some 
 things reasoning is known to be well -founded, with regard 
 to the matter in hand there will be no escape, i.e. reasoning 
 cannot there escape from the charge of being ill-founded. 
 The true nature of the cause of the world on which final 
 emancipation depends cannot, on account of its excessive 
 abstruseness, even be thought of without the help of the 
 holy texts ; for it cannot become the object of perception 
 because it does not possess qualities such as form and the like, 
 and, as it is devoid of characteristic signs or qualities, it cannot 
 lend itself to inference and other means of right knowledge/ 
 
 Here we approach a very difficult question, and have 
 possibly to admit a weak link in the strong chain armour 
 of both B&dar&yana and Sarakara. How is the supreme 
 authority of the Veda to be established against those who 
 
THE MEANING 01? VEDA. . 149 
 
 doubt it ? Jt may be enough for the orthodox to say that; 
 the Veda is its own proof, that it is self-luminous like the 
 sun : but how are objections to be silenced ? The Vedanta 
 philosophers have no superstitions on any- other points, and 
 are perfectly fearless in the treatment of all other problems; 
 they can enter into the most subtle controversies, and yet 
 they are satisfied wifch the mere assertion that the Veda 
 wants no proof, that its authority requires no support from 
 elsewhere (praniaiiyam nirapeksham), that it is direct 
 evidence of truth, just as the light of the sun is its own 
 evidence of light, and at the same time the direct moans of 
 our knowledge of form and colour (II, i, i). 
 
 Authority of the Vedas. 
 
 But who says so? Who but a fallible mortal? It 
 would be hardly enough if we were to say that the Veda 
 was the oldest document which the Brahmaris possessed, that 
 it may even have been brought into India from another 
 country, that its very language required to be interpreted 
 by competent persons. All this might have helped to 
 invest the Veda with some kind of mysterious Character ; 
 but my impression has always been that this would be 
 taking too low a view of the Indian intellect. Veda, I hold, 
 was not merely the name of a text or of texts, but was ori- 
 ginally conceived in a far deeper sense. 
 
 T&e meaning of Veda. 
 
 We often read that Veda, is Brahman, and Brahman is 
 Veda, and in such passages Brahman is now generally 
 taken in the sense of the Samhitas and Brhma7ias such as 
 we possess them. But might it not, like Aptavafcma, to 
 which we referred before, have meant originally knowledge 
 or wisdom or Sophia ; and as such a Sophia was impossible 
 without words, might we not here also have a faint recol- 
 lection of Brahman as the Word, the firsfc creation of divine 
 thought. After all, .Veda means originally knowledge, and 
 not hymns and Brahmaftas, and as such would come very 
 near to Wisdom or Sophia. I do not venture to speak 
 positively on such a subject, because there is so little of 
 real evidence left to which we could appeal. I give it 
 
I5O INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 simply as an idea that has presented itself to my mind as 
 a way out of many difficulties. To prevent all misunder- 
 standings I say at once that I do not entertain the idea 
 that such thoughts were borrowed from Greece and Alex- 
 andria, or had been matured during the as yet undivided 
 Aryan period. All I should venture to suggest is that the 
 idea of the Word or the Logos being the first revelation, 
 manifestation or creation of a Divine Power is by no means 
 so strange, even in a very early period of thought, as it 
 seems to us. People who have thought at all about what 
 a word is, not a mere 'sign or a means of communication, 
 bub an act embodying for the first time a definite idea 
 which came. into existence by being uttered, and afterwards 
 thrown forth and realised in our objective world, would 
 naturally, whether in Greece or in India, recognise in every 
 word an act of a Divine Thinker, just as in every species 
 they have to recognise the will of a Divine Creator. $am- 
 kara goes so far as to declare that the Veda is the cause 
 of the distinction of all the different classes and conditions 
 (species) of gods, animals, and men (I, I, 3, and 'Brih. Ar. 
 Upan. II, 4, 10). Nay he speaks still more distinctly in 
 I,. 3, 28: * We all know from observation/ he says, * that 
 any one, when setting about something which he wishes to 
 accomplish, first remembers the word denoting the thing, 
 and after that sets to work/ What should he do when 
 there is as yet no word to remember, but the Word, that is, 
 the idea, has first to be created 1 We therefore conclude 
 that, before the creation, the Vedic words became manifest 
 in the mind of Prar/apati the creator, and that after that 
 he created the things corresponding to these words. The 
 /Sruti also, when it says * uttering Bhur He created the 
 earth, &c./ shows that the worlds, such as the earth, &c., 
 became manifest, i. e. were created, from the word Bhur, 
 which had become manifest in the mind (of Pragapati). 
 In that case the recognition by Indian thinkers of Brahman 
 as tho Word or -the Divine Thought, or as Veda, would by 
 no means be so surprising as it sounds to us at first. It 
 might then be Said quite truly that the >Sabda, sound, or 
 Brahman or Va/c or *Brih = word, was eternal, absolute, 
 self-luminous, self-evident, in fact all that the Veda is said 
 
WOltK-PART AND KNOWLEDGE-PART OP THF- VEDA. 
 
 to be. Two such words as Brahman and Atman would by 
 themselves convey that eternal truth for which the Vedanta- 
 philosophy is fighting, and in support of which there is bufc.. 
 one appeal, not to sensuous experience nor to inference, 
 but to the Word itself, i.e. to Brahman, or the Veda. 
 I know full well how entirely hypothetical, if not mystical, 
 this may sound to many Sanskrit scholars, but I could not 
 entirely suppress these thoughts, as they seem to me the 
 only way in which we can free our Vedanta philosophers 
 from the charge of childishness, for imagining that they 
 could establish the highest truths which are within the 
 reach of the human mind, on such authorities as the hymns, 
 the Brahma^as and even some of the Upanishads, &s we 
 possess them now. 
 
 Returning to the Vedanca, however, such as we know it 
 from the Sutras, we must be satisfied with the expressea 
 view of Badaraya?ia that the evidence for what the Yed&ntd 
 teaches is neither perception nor inference, but the Word 
 (/Sabda) alone, such as we find it in our manuscripts, or 
 rather in the oral tradition of the Veda. 
 
 Work-part and Knowledge-part of the Veda. 
 
 Of course a distinction has to be made, and has been 
 made by Badaraya?ta between the Knowledge-part, the 
 G^ana-k&ftcZa, chiefly the Upanishads, and the Karma- 
 karcda, the Work-part, the hymns and Brahma /ms. Both 
 are called Veda or $ruti, revelation, and yet the work-part 
 does not exist for the true philosopher, except in order to 
 be discarded as soon as he has understood the knowledge- 
 part. $arakara is bold enough to declare that the whole 
 Veda is useless to a man who has obtained knowledge, or 
 Mukti, or freedom. * Not all the Vedas together/ he says, 
 ' are more useful to one who has obtained true knowledge 
 than is a small tank of water in a country flooded with 
 water/ A man who has neglected the Vedas and disre- 
 garded thu rules of the four Asramas, in fact, a man who 
 has lost caste, may still be allowed to study the Vedanta 
 as the fountain of all true knowledge, and thus become 
 liberated (III, 4, 36). The hymns and Brahrruuias refer in 
 fact to the 'phenomenal world, they presuppose the exist- 
 
152 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 ence of a manifold creation, of an enjoyer of what is to be 
 enjoyed, of good works and their fruit. But all this, as we 
 shall see, is not real, but phenomenal; it belongs to the 
 realm of Avidya, Nescience, and vanishes as soon as true 
 wisdom or Vidya has been obtained. It is to be observed 
 in the world, such as it is, as a lower stage, but as essential 
 in leading on to a higher stage. 
 
 Vidyfl, and Avi&ya. 
 
 If then the highest truth contained in the Veda is the 
 Tat Tvam,Asi, that is, Thou, the Givatman, art it (the 
 Parawatman or Brahman), and if, as we are told, there is 
 but one Brahman and nothing beside it, the Vedanta philo- 
 sopher is at once met by the question, How then are we to 
 account for the manifold Thou's, the many individuals; and 
 the immense variety of the objective world? If the Veda 
 is true, our view of the world cannot be true at the same 
 time. It can therefore be due only to what is called 
 Avidya, Nescience, and it is the very object of the Vedanta- 
 philosophy to expel and annihilate this Avidya, and replace 
 it by Vidya. 
 
 Subject and Object. 
 
 This Avidyft is the next point that has to be discussed. 
 $amkara, in the introduction to his commentary, has some 
 important remarks on it 1 . ' As it is well known,' he says, 
 * that object and subject, which fall under the concepts of 
 We and You (or as we should say, of the Ego arid Non- 
 Ego), are in their very essence opposed -to each other, like 
 darkness and light, and that the one can never therefore 
 take the place of the other, it follows further that their 
 attributes also can never be interchanged.' This means 
 that object and subject mutually exclude each other, so 
 that what is conceived as object can never in the same act 
 of thought be conceived as subject, and vice versa. We can, 
 for instance, never say or think : We are you, or You are 
 we, nor ought we ever to substitute subjective for objective 
 qualities. ' Therefore/ he continues, * we may conclude 
 that to transfer what is objective, that is what is perceived 
 
 1 Three Lectures on the Vod&nta, p. 62. 
 
SUBJECT AND OBJECT. 153 
 
 as You or Non-ego with its qualities, to what is subjective, 
 that is what perceives as We, the Ego, which consists of 
 thought, or vice versa to transfer what is subjective to 
 what is objective, must be altogether wrong.' A subject 
 can never be anything but a subject, the object always 
 remains the object. * Nevertheless/ he adds, < it is a habit 
 in human nature (a necessity of thought, as* we might call 
 it), to say, combining what is true and what is false, " I afh 
 this/ 3 " this is mine, &c. This is a habit, caused by a false 
 apprehension^ of subject and predicate, and by not distin- 
 guishing one from the other, but transferring the essence 
 and the qualities of the one upon the other/ 
 
 It is clear that $amkara here uses subject and object net 
 only in their simple logical sense, but that by subject he 
 means what is real and true, in fact the Self, while object 
 means with him what is unreal and phenomenal, such as the 
 body with its organs, and the whole visible world. In 
 * I am/ tiie verb has a totally different character from what 
 it has in ' thou art * .or * he is.' Such statements therefore 
 as 4 1 am strong/ or ' I am blind/ arise from a false appre- 
 hension which, though it is inseparable from human thought, 
 such as it is, has slowly to be overcome and at last to be 
 destroyed by the Vedanta-phiiosophy. 
 
 This distinction between subject and object in the sense 
 of what is real and what is phenomenal is very important, 
 and stamps the whole of the Vedanta-philosophy with its 
 own peculiar character. 
 
 It follows in fact from this fundamental distinction that 
 we should never predicate what is phenomenal or objective 
 of what is real and subjective, or what is real and subjec- 
 tive of what is phenomenal and objective; and it is in 
 causing tliis mistake that the chief power of Avidya or 
 Nescience consists. I should even go so far as to say that 
 this warning might be taken to heart by our own philo- 
 sophers also, for many of our own fallacies arise from the 
 same Avidya, and are due in the end to the attribution of 
 phenomenal and objective qualities to the subjective reali- 
 ties which we should recognise in the Divine only, and as 
 underlying the Human Self and the phenomenal world. 
 
 It must not be supposed, however, that the Avidya or 
 
154 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Nescience which makes the world what we make it and 
 take it to be, is simply our own individual ignorance, our 
 being unacquainted with the truths of the Vedanta. It 
 should rather be looked upon as inborn in human nature, 
 or, from an Indian point of view, as the result of accumu- 
 lated thoughts and deeds before the mountains were brought 
 forth. It has. truly been called a general cosmical Nes- 
 cience, inevitable for a time, as darkness is with light. So 
 far as in true reality we are Brahman, our Nescience might 
 indeed be called the Nescience of Brahman, if for a time 
 only; and if we remember that it can be annihilated, we 
 can understand why it was said to be nought, for, according 
 to a general principle of the Vedanta, nothing that is real' 
 can ever be annihilated, so that nothing that is liable to 
 annihilation has a right to be called real. 
 
 The Phenomenal Reality of the World. 
 
 But it is very curious to find that though $arakara looks 
 upon the whole objective world as the result of Nescience, 
 he nevertheless allows it to be real for all practical purposes 
 (Vyavaharartham). Thus we read (II, i, 14), * The entire 
 complex of phenomenal existence is considered as true so 
 long as the Knowledge of Brahman and the Self of all has 
 not arisen, just as the phantoms of a drearn are considered 
 to be true until the sleeper wakes. . . .' Hence, as long as 
 true knowledge does not present itself, there is no reason 
 why the ordinary course of secular and religious activity 
 should not go on undisttirbed, and more particularly, why 
 all the commands of the Veda, even of the work-part, 
 should not be obeyed. . 
 
 But apart from this concession, the fundamental doctrine 
 of $amkara remains always the same. There is Brahman 
 and nothing else ; and to this Brahman as the subject, 
 nothing must be ascribed that is peculiar to the individual 
 living soul (I, 3, 19). The individual, soul is, no. doubt, 
 Brahman, for the simple reason that there is nothing but 
 Brahman, but Brahman is riot the individual soul, which in 
 its present state is personal, that is conditioned, and pheno- 
 menal. All we may predicate of that Highest Brahman is 
 
CREATION OB CAUSATION. 155 
 
 that it is one, never changing, never in contact with any- 
 thing, devoid of all form, eternally pure, intelligent and 
 free. To ascribe anything phenomenal to that Brahman or 
 Atman would be the same error as to ascribe blue colour to 
 the colourless ether of the sky. 
 
 Creation or Causation. 
 
 If with these ideas, taken as granted, we approach the 
 problem of what we call the creation or the making of the 
 world, it is clear that creation in our sense -cannot exist 
 for the Vedantist. As long as creation is conceived as 
 a making or fashioning of matter, it does not exist for 
 Badarayarta; only so far as it is a calling forth out of 
 nothing does it approach the ideas of the Vedantist. Crea- 
 tion with Badaraya?ia would be nothing but the result of 
 Nescience, and yet Brahman is again .and again repre- 
 sented as the cause of the world, and not only as the 
 efficient, but as the material cause as well, so far as such 
 foreign terms can be applied to the reasoning of the Ve- 
 danta. Here lies our great difficulty in rendering Hindu- 
 philosophy intelligible. The terms used by them seem to 
 be the same as those which we use ourselves, and yet they 
 are not. It is easy to say that Kararia is cause and Karya 
 effect, that the created world is the effect, and that Brah- 
 man is the cause. But the Vedahtists have elaborated 
 their own theory of cause and effect. According to them 
 cause and effect are really the same thing looked at from 
 two points of view, and the effect is always supposed to 
 be latent in the cause. Hence, if Brahman is everything, 
 and nothing exists besides Brahman, the substance of the 
 world can be nothing, but Brahman. Divyadasa, a living 
 Vedantist, seems therefore to draw a quite legitimate in- 
 ference when he says 1 that the universe with all its sins 
 and miseries must have existed latent in Brahman, just 
 as steam existed latent in water before it was heated, 
 though it does not become evident as vapour till tire is 
 brought near to water. 
 
 1 Lectures on the Vedanta, p. 24. 
 
156 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Cause aad Effect. 
 
 This question of cause and effect and their mutual rela- 
 tion has occupied most of the philosophical systems of 
 India; and when we remember what different views of 
 cause and effect have beun held by some of the most 
 eminent philosophers of Europe, it is not surprising that 
 the Hindus also should have arrived at very different 
 results. The Vedantists stand up for Karya-kara?iabheda, 
 the non-difference or substantial identity of cause and effect, 
 and the Samkhya philosophers agree with them up to a 
 certain point. In the Vedanta, .11, I, 14, we read in so 
 many words, Tadananyatvam, that is, ' they, cause and 
 effect, are not other, are not different from each other/ 
 On this, as a general principle, ress their dogma of the 
 substantial identity of Brahman and the phenomenal world, 
 Nor does $amkara support this principle by passages from 
 the Veda only, but he appeals likewise to observation. 
 Thus he continues, II, i, 15, 'Only when a cause exists 
 is an effect observed to exist, not when it does riot exist. 
 The non-difference of the two (cause and effect) is perceived, 
 for instance, in an aggregate of threads, when we do not 
 perceive the thing which we call cloth in addition to the 
 threads, but merely threads running lengthways, and cross- 
 ways. In the threads again we perceive finer threads, and 
 in these again still finer threads, and so on. On this ground 
 we conclude that the very finest parts which we can per- 
 ceive are ultimately identical with, their causes, viz. red, 
 white, and black, these again with air, the air with ether, 
 and, at last, the ether with Brahman which is without 
 a second and the ultimate cause of the whole world. Or 
 again, when we look at a tree and ask what it is, when we 
 see through its leaves and fruits, its bark and wood, and 
 ask again what it is, the answer comes that it would be 
 nothing if it were not Brahman, that it lives through Brah- 
 man, that it exists through Brahman, that it would not be 
 at all but for Brahman. This is the real Pantheism of the 
 Vedanta : and strange as it may sound to us, it would not 
 be difficult to match it whether from our own philosophers 
 or our poets. Even so recent a poet as Tennyson is reported 
 
CAUSE AND EFFECT. 157 
 
 to have said, ' Perhaps this earth and all that is in it 
 storms, mountains, cataracts, the sun and the skies, are the 
 Almighty: in fact, such is our petty nature, we cannot 
 see Him, but we see His shadow, as it were, a distorted 
 shadow/ Is not this pure Vedanta? only that the Ve- 
 daritists hold that a cause, by its very nature, can never 
 become the object of perception, while what Tennyson calls 
 the distorted shadow would come very near to the Avidya 
 of iSawkara. The Veda has declared * that what is posterior 
 in time, Le. the effect, has its being, previous to its actual 
 beginning, in the nature of the cause/ And $arakara adds 
 that, even, in cases where the continued existence of the 
 cause (in the effect) is not perceived, as, for instance, in 
 the case of seeds of the fig-tree from which spring sprouts 
 and new trees, the term birth, as applied to the sprout, 
 means only that the causal substance, viz. the seed, becomes 
 visible by becoming a sprout through the continued accre- 
 tion of similar particles, while the term death means no 
 more than that through the secession of these particles, the 
 cause passes again beyond the sphere of visibility. 
 
 This problem of cause and effect in connection with the 
 problem of Brahman and the world was no doubt beset 
 with difficulties in the eyes of the Vedantists. If they 
 turned to the Veda, particularly to the Upanishads, there 
 were ever so many passages declaring that Brahman is one 
 and unchangeable, while in other passages the same Brah- 
 man is called the Creator, and from him, and not, as the 
 Samkhyas hold, from a second non-intelligent power, called 
 Prakriti, the creation, sttstentation, and reabsorption of the 
 world are said to proceed. If it be asked how two such 
 opinions can be reconciled, 6'a.mkara answers : ' Belonging 
 to the Self, as it were, of the omniscient Lord, there are 
 names and forms (Namarupa)/ These correspond very 
 closely to the Logoi of Greek philosophy, except that, 
 instead of being the ideas of a Divine Mind, they are the 
 figments of Nescience, not to be defined as either real 
 (Brahman), or as different from it. They are the germs 
 of the entire expanse of the phenomenal world, that is, 
 of whatinSruti and Snm'ti is called illusion (Maya), power 
 (&akti), or nature (Prakriti). Different, however, from all 
 
158 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 this is the Omniscient Lord, and in support of this a 
 number of Vedic passages may be quoted, such as 'He 
 who is called Ether is the revealer of all forms and names ; 
 that wherein these forms and names are contained, that is 
 Brahman' (J^M-nd. Up. VIII, 14, i); Let me evolve names 
 and forms ' (JfAand. Up. VI, 3, 2) ; ' He, the wise one, having 
 defined all forms and having made their names, sits speak- 
 ing/ i.e. creating (Taitt. Ar. Ill, 12, 7); 'He who makes 
 the one seed manifold ' (/Svet. Up. VI, 12). The Lord as 
 creator, as Lord or tsvara, depends upon the limiting 
 conditions of the Upadhis of name and form, and these, 
 even in the Lord, are represented as products of Nescience, 
 not like the Logoi, creations of a Divine Wisdom. The 
 true Self, according to the Vedanta, is all the time free 
 from all conditions, free from names and forms, and for 
 the truly informed enlightened man the whole phenomenal 
 world is really non-existent. 
 
 To steer between all these rocks is no easy matter. 
 Brahman, though called the material cause (Upadana) of 
 the world, is himself immaterial, nay the world, of wnich 
 he is the cause, is considered as unreal /while at the same 
 time cause and effect are held to be identical in substance. 
 
 While the Vedantist is threatened by all these breakers, 
 the Samkhya philosopher is far less imperilled. He starts 
 with a Prakriti, a power different from Brahman, gener- 
 ally, though very imperfectly, translated by Nature, as the 
 material cause of the world. Prakriti exists, as far as 
 man is concerned, only so far as it is taken notice of by 
 man (Purusha) ; and he, the Purusha, on taking notice, 
 may therefore be called the efficient cause of the world, 
 Prakriti itself being its material cause. Otherwise Kapila 
 takes much the same view of the relation between cause 
 and effect as the Vedantist. The Karya-karanabheda, the 
 identity "of cause and effect, is valid as much for S&rakhya 
 as for Vedanta. According to both, no real effect would 
 be possible without the continuance of its cause. Though 
 different in appearance or phenomenally, both are the same 
 substantially. An effect is not something newly produced 
 or created, it is a new manifestation only, the cause being 
 never destroyed, but rendered invisible only. This is so 
 
CAUSE AND EFFECT. 159 
 
 characteristic a dogma of the Samkhya that this philo- 
 sophy is often spoken of as the Sat-karyavada, the doctrine 
 that every effect pre-exists, and is the effect of something 
 real, while the Asat-karyavada is peculiar to Nyaya and 
 Vaiseshika, and strongly supported by the Buddhists. 
 Whether this doctrine of the identity of cause and effect was 
 first proclaimed by Kapila or by BadarayaTia, it is almost 
 impossible to settle. Professor Garbe \ who claims it for 
 Kapila, may be right in supposing that it would be a more 
 natural theorem for a follower of the Samkhya than of 
 the Vedanta, but this could never be used as an argument 
 that the Samkhya-philosophy is older in its entirety than 
 the Ved&nta. $amkara himself certainly gives us the im- 
 pression that with him the recognition of the identity 
 of cause and effect came first, and afterwards its religious 
 application, the identity of Brahman and the world. For 
 he says (II, i, 20), ' Thus the non-difference of the effect 
 from the cause is to be conceived. And therefore, as the 
 whole world is an effect of Brahman, and non-different 
 from it, the promise is fulfilled.' It is curious that Kapila 
 seems, almost in so many words, to guard against what 
 is known to us as Hume's view of causality. For in Stitra 
 I, 4, i, he says, If it were only priority, there would be no 
 law or hold (Niyama) between cause and effect. 1 
 
 The Sat-karyavada, which might be compared with 
 Herbart's ftelbsterhaltung des Realen, is often illustrated 
 by the very popular simile of the rope which is mistaken 
 for a snake, but which, even in its mistaken character, has 
 the very real effect of frightening those who step on it. 
 There is more in this often-quoted simile than at first 
 sight appears. It is meant to show that as the rope is 
 to the snake, so Brahman is to the world. There is no 
 idea of claiming for the rope a real change into a snake, 
 and in the same way no real change can be claimed for 
 Brahman, when perceived as the world. Brahman presents 
 itself as the world, and apart from Brahman the world 
 would be simply nothing. If, therefore, Brahman is called 
 the material cause of the world, this is not meant in the 
 
 1 Samkhya- Philosophic, p. 232. 
 
160 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 sense in which the clay is the material cause of a jar. 
 Even the apparent and illusory existence of a material 
 world requires a real substratum, which is Brahman, just 
 as the appearance of the snake in the simile requires the 
 real substratum of a rope. If we once see this clearly, we 
 shall also see that Nescience may quite as well be called 
 . the material cause of the world as Brahman, the fact being 
 that, strictly speaking, there is with the Vedantists no 
 matter at all; in our sense of the word. 
 
 Breaming and Waking 1 , 
 
 There is, however, in the Vedanta, as well as in many 
 other systems of philosophy, a certain ambiguity as to 
 what is meant by material and real. One would have 
 thought that philosophers, who look upon everything as 
 the result of Avidya or Nescience, would have denied 
 all reality in the highest sense to everything except Brah- 
 man. And so in a certain sense they do. But besides the 
 concession to which we alluded before, that for practical 
 purposes (Vyavaharartham) things may be treated as real, 
 whatever we may think of them in our heart of hearts, 
 a concession, by-the-by, which even Berkeley and Kant 
 would readily have allowed, there is another important 
 argument, It is clearly directed against Buddhist philo- 
 sophers who, carrying tile Vedanta principle to its extreme 
 consequences, held that everything is empty and unreal, 
 and that all we have and know are our perceptions only. 
 This is called the Sftnyavada (doctrine of emptiness or 
 vanity) or Vidyamatra (knowledge only). Although some 
 Vedantists have been credited with holding the same 
 opinion, and have actually been called Cryptobuddhists 
 in consequence, Samkara himself argues most strongly 
 against this extreme idealism. He not only allows the 
 reality of the objective world for practical purposes (Vya- 
 vaharartham), but he enters on a full argument against 
 the nihilism of the Buddhists. These maintain that per- 
 ception in dreams is oi* the same kind as all other perception, 
 and that the admission of the existence of external things 
 is therefore unnecessary. No, says jS'amkara, there is a 
 difference between perceiving viands and perceiving the 
 
DREAMING AND WAKING. , l6l 
 
 satisfaction arising from eating them. He holds, therefore, 
 that in perceiving anything we not only perceive our per- 
 ceptions, but perceive something not ourselves, and not 
 our perceptions. He also points out that there is this 
 difference between dreaming and waking, that dreams on 
 awaking are found to be unreal. Dreams at night are 
 contradicted by full daylight, but. perceptions in full day- 
 light are not contradicted by dreams. When the Btiddhist 
 replies that, in spite of that, we never can be said to per- 
 ceive anything but perceptions, the Tedantist answers that, 
 though we perceive perceptions only, these perceptions are 
 always perceived as perceptions of something. And if the 
 Buddhists answer that these perceptions are illusive only, 
 that they are perceptions o things as if they were without 
 us, the Vedantist asks What is meant by that ' without us/ 
 to which all things perceived by us are referred ? If our 
 perceptions conform to anything without us, the existence 
 of such perceived objects is ipso facto admitted. No one 
 would say that perception and what is perceived are iden- 
 tical ; they stand to each other in the relation of instrument 
 and effect, just as when we speak of an impression, we 
 admit something that impresses as well as something that 
 is impressed. 
 
 This must suffice to show what the Vedantists thought 
 of the difference between the real and the phenomenal, and 
 what was the meaning they attached to Avidy& by which 
 not only the individual Egos, but the whole phenomenal 
 World exists or seems to exist.. Creation is not real in the 
 highest sense in which Brahman is real, but it is real in so 
 far as it is phenomenal, for nothing can be phenomenal 
 except as the phenomenon of something that is real. No 
 wonder that, with all these ambiguities about .the pheno- 
 menally real and the, really real, different schools even in 
 India should have differed in their views about Avidygi, 
 and that European scholars also should have failed to form 
 a clear idea of that creative Nescience of which we can 
 neither say that it is or that it is not. Avidya, like all 
 other words, has had a history. In the Upanishads it is 
 often used in the simple sense of ignorance, and opposed 
 to Vidy&, knowledge. Both are in that sense simply sub- 
 11 M 
 
1 62 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 jective. Thijs we read, jKMnd. Up. I, i, 10 : * Both perform 
 the sacrificial act, he who knows and he who does not 
 know. But there is a difference between Vidya (know- 
 ledge) and Avidya (nescience). For what is performed with 
 Vidya, with faith, and with the Upanishad, that is more 
 efficacious/ Or again, Brih. Ar. Up. IV, 3, 20 : ' If he feels 
 in a dream as if he were murdered, then, in his ignorance, 
 he takes that to be real whatever he fears, when awake/ 
 Here we see that it is ignorance alone which imparts a false 
 character of reality to the visions of a dream. In the same 
 Upanishad, IV, 4, 3, a man, when dying, is said to shake 
 off his body and his Avidya. We are right therefore, 
 I believe, if historically we trace the concept of Avidya 
 back to the subjective ignorance of the individual, just as 
 we saw that the higher concept of the Self, though in the 
 end identical with Brahman, arose from that of the indi- 
 vidual personal Self , when as yet not free from the limits 
 of the Ego. In some of the later Upanishads this Nesci- 
 ence or Ignorance assumes a more independent character 
 and even a new name, viz. M&ya. It. is then no longer the 
 Nescience of the individual, but the result of that universal 
 Nescience, which is the cause of what we should call the 
 phenomenal world. Thus we read in the /Svet. Up. IV, 10 : 
 ' Know Prakriti (nature) as Maya (magic), and the great 
 Lord as the May in, (magician)/ Though this is not pure 
 Vedanta, it shows us, at all events, the way by which the 
 ignorance of the individual became the cause of what we 
 call objective reality, and led, at the same time, to the 
 admission of an, active and creative Lord, the personal 
 Brahma or Isvara ; how Avidya in fact became a /Sakti or 
 potentia, somehow or other related to Brahman itself. 
 
 But before there arises this M&ya of objective nature, 
 belonging as it were to Brahman himself, there was the 
 Maya of the internal or subjective world. THis was 
 originally the only Maya, and, deceived by that Maya or 
 Avidya, the Atman, or pure Self, was covered up (Upahita) 
 or blinded, or conditioned by the so-called Upadhis, the 
 conditions or impositions, if we may say so, in both senses. 
 There is here again a certain ambiguity, the UpMhis being 
 caused by primeval Avidya, and, from another point of 
 
DREAMING AND WAKING. 163 
 
 view, Avidya\ being caused in the individual soul (Giv&b- 
 man) by the UpMhis. These Upadhis are : 
 
 1. The Mukhyapr&raa, the vital spirit; (unconscious) ; 
 
 2. the Manas, the central organ of perception, ready to 
 receive what is conveyed to it by the separate senses, and 
 to react on them by will ; Manas being that which, as we 
 say, perceives, feels, thinks and wills ; 
 
 3. the Indriyas, the five senses, both afferent and efferent. 
 The five afferent (Upalabdhi) senses are the senses of 
 hearing, touch, sight, taste, scent. The five efferent or 
 acting senses (Adhyavasaya l ) are the senses of speaking, 
 grasping, going, evp"uat:*ng and generating ; 
 
 4. the material organic body. 
 To these is sometimes added 
 
 5. The objective environment, or the objects or meanings 
 of the senses (Artha). 
 
 All these are not the Atman, and it is only through 
 Avidy& that the Atman has become identified with them. 
 
 That there is in man something that can be called Atman 
 or Self requires no proof, but if a proof were wanted it 
 would be found in the fact that no one can say, 'I am not* 
 (I being the disguised Atman), for he who would say so, 
 would himself be not, or would not be. The question then 
 is, What is really I or what is there real behind the 1 1 It 
 cannot be the body as influenced by our objective environ- 
 irient, for that body is perishable ; it cannot be the Indriyas 
 or the Manas "or the MukhyaprS/tta, for all these have 
 a beginning, a growth, and therefore an end. All these, 
 called the Upadhis, conditions, are to be treated as Not- 
 self ; and if it be asked why they should ever have been 
 treated as Self, the only possible answer is that it was 
 through Nescience or Avidy&, but through a Nescience 
 that is not only casual or individual, but universal. What 
 in our common language we call the Ego or Ahamkra 
 is but a product of the Manas and quite as unsubstantial 
 in reality as the Manas itself, the senses and the whole 
 body. 
 
 We can understand how this startling idealism or 
 
 1 Adhyavasftyo buddhifc, S&wkhya-Sfttras II, 13. 
 M 2 
 
1 64 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 monism for it is not nihilism, though our philosophy has no 
 better name for it led to two distinct, yet closely united 
 view? if the world. Ail that we should call phenomenal, 
 comprehending the phenomena of our inward as well as 
 of our outward experience, was unreal ; but, as the pheno- 
 menal was considered impossible without the noumenal, 
 that is, without the real Brahman, it was in that sense real 
 also, that is, it exists, and can only exist, with Brahman 
 behind it. And this led to the admission by the strict 
 Advaitists or Monists of two kinds of knowledge, well 
 -known' under the names of Apara, the lower, and Jrar&, the 
 higher knowledge. 
 
 Th Higher and th X-ower Knowledge. 
 
 The higher knowledge consists in A the distinction and 
 thereby the freedom of the Self (Atman) from all its 
 Upadhis, and this not for this life only, but for all eter- 
 nity. This is the true Moksha or freedom which implies 
 knowledge of the identity of the Atman with Brahman, 
 and deliverance from birth and rebirth in the constant 
 evolution (Sams&ra) of the world. The lower knowledge 
 is likewise founded on the Veda, but chiefly on its work- 
 portion (Karmakanda), and teaches, not how Brahman is 
 to be known, but how it or he is to be worshipped in its or 
 his phenomenal state, that is, as a personal Lord and Crea- 
 tor, or even under the name of any individual deity. This 
 worship (Up&san&) being enjoined in many parts of the 
 Veda, 'is recognised as obligatory on all who have not yet 
 reached the highest knowledge. These are even allowed 
 the comfort that, in worshipping a personal god, they are 
 really worshipping Brahman, the true Godhead, though in 
 its phenomenal aspect only, and they are promised, as 
 a reward of their worship, happiness on earth and in 
 heaven, nay by way of preparation, a slow advance (Kra- 
 mamukti) towards complete Moksha or freedom. 
 
 In this sense it has been truly said that $arakara did not 
 attack or destroy idolatry, though with him it was always 
 symbolism rather than idolatry. On this point which has 
 given rise to much controversy among the Hindus them- 
 
THE HIGHEH AND THE LOWEE KNOWLEDGE. 165 
 
 selves, some appealing to $amkara's contempt of all ritual* 
 ism and Karman, others to his defence of a worship of the 
 popular gods, I may quote the words of a living Ved&ntist. 
 Divyadas Datta, in his Lectttre on Vedantism, p. 1 2. ' It 
 is certain/ he says, ' that $amkara was opposed to the 
 abuse of ritualism, and though he did not cut off all con- 
 nection with idolatry, he tried to introduce the right spirit 
 of idolatry. Idolatry in the sense of religious symbolism 
 and I believe the most orthodox Hindus would take no 
 other view cannot be open to objection. Symbolism there 
 must be, whether in words or things. Verbal symbols 
 appeal to the ear, and the symbols of things to the eye, and 
 that is all the difference between them. Verbal symbolism 
 is language. Who 'would object to the use of language in 
 religion ? But if the one is allowed, why shouid not also 
 the other? To my mind, idolatry, apart from its attendant 
 corruptions, is a religious algebra. And if verbal symbols, 
 without the spirit or in a corrupted spirit, are not objec- 
 tionable, [but are they not ?] so, and to the same extent, 
 formal symbols, or stocks and stones also are unobjection- 
 able. At one stage of its growth, idolatry is a necessity of 
 our nature. The tender seed of a religious spirit requires 
 to be carefully preserved in a soft coating of -symbols, till 
 it has acquired the strength to resist the nipping frost of 
 worldliness and scepticism. . . . When the religious spirit is 
 mature, symbols are either given up, or suffered to remain 
 from their harmlessness. . . . . Samkara did bow to idols, 
 sometimes as symbols of the great Infinite, sometimes as 
 symbols of lower orders of beings in whom he believed. . . . 
 These lower orders of divine beings, Brahma, Vishnu, Indra, 
 Yama, &c., in whom he believfed, are phenomenal, $nd subject 
 to creation and dissolution as much as ourselves/ &amkara 
 himself expresses this opinion very clearly when (I, 3, 38) 
 he says: 'The gods (or deities) must be* admitted to be 
 corporeal, and though by their divine powers they can, at 
 one and the same time, partake of oblations offered at 
 numerous sacrifices, they are still, like ourselves, subject to 
 birth and death/ 
 
 If a?nkara did riot dbim full freedom or Moksha for 
 himself, he did so, as he says, for the sake of others. * If 
 
1 66 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 I/ he says, 'had not walked Without remission in the path 
 of works, others would not have followed my steps, 
 O Lord ! ' 
 
 Is Virtue Essential to Moksha ? 
 
 Another question which has been hotly contested both 
 in India and in Europe is whether Moksha can be the result 
 of knowledge only, or whether it requires a fulfilment of 
 moral duties also *. Though, as far as I understand $ara- 
 kara, knowledge alone can in the end lead to Moksha, 
 virtue is certainly presupposed. It is the same question 
 which meets us with regard to the Buddhist Nirvana. 
 This also was in the beginning the result and the reward 
 of moral virtue, of the restraint of passions and of perfect 
 tranquillity of soul, such as we find it described, for instance, 
 in the Dhammapada ; but it soon assumed a different char- 
 acter, as representing freedom from all bondage and 
 illusion, amounting to a denial of all reality in the objec- 
 tive, and likewise in the subjective world. There are a few 
 traces left in the Upanishads, showing that virtue was-con- 
 sidered an essential preliminary of Moksha. In the KatKa, 
 TJpanishad II, i, which is generally quoted for that purpose, 
 we read: 'The good is one thing, the pleasant another; 
 these two having different objects chain a man. It is 
 well with him, if he clings to the good ; but he who chooses 
 the pleasant, misses his end. The good and the pleasant 
 approach a man ; the wise goes round about them and dis- 
 tinguishes them. Yea, the wise prefers the good to the 
 pleasant, but the fool chooses thp pleasant through greed 
 and avarice/ But even in this passage we are not told 
 that virtue or self-denial by itself could secure Moksha or 
 perfect freedom ; nay, if we only read a few lines further, 
 we see : ' Wide apart and leading to different points are 
 those two, ignorance ( Avidya) and what is known as wisdom 
 (Vidya).' And Na/dketas is praised because he desires 
 knowledge, and is not tempted away from it by pleasure. 
 Still less convincing are passages taken from the Bhagavad- 
 gita, a work which was meant to present different views 
 
 See Mokaha or the Vedantic Release, by Divyadas Datta, Journal of 
 the R. A. S., vol. xx, part 4. 
 
IS VIRTUE ESSENTIAL TO MQKSFA? 167 
 
 of Moksha. All of them, no doubt, though they do not 
 explicitly say so, presuppose high morality on the part of 
 the candidate, so that Arguna is made to say for himself : 
 
 (Janami dharmam, na &a me prav?^tti&, 
 (?anamy adharmam, -na Aa me mvriitih, 
 
 which has been somewhat freely translated : ' For what 
 I would that I do not, Lut what I hate that do I.' 
 
 That later treatises, such as the Pa/?&adast, should lay 
 great stress on the religious and moral side of Moksha is 
 tyuite compatible with what has been maintained before, 
 that Moksha cannot be achieved by sacrifices or by moral 
 conduct, but in the end by knowledge only. Hence a 
 prayer such as, 
 
 ' May such unchanging love as foolish people feel for 
 earthly pleasures never cease in my heart when I call upon 
 Thee ! ' 
 
 may well be uttered by worshippers of Brahma or Isvara, 
 but not by the true Mumukshu, \v ho is yearning for Brah- 
 man and true Moksha. 
 
 Even the prayer from the Brihad-araTiyaka (I, 3, 28) 
 
 * Lead me from the unreal to the real ! Lead me from 
 darkness to light ! Lead me from death to immortality ! ' 
 refers to the lower knowledge only, and has for its 
 reward another world, that is, the heaven world, which 
 will also pass away. 
 
 It would not be difficult, no doubt, to produce passages 
 which declare that a sinful man cannot obtain Mqksha, 
 but that is very different from saying that Moksha can be 
 obtained by mere abstaining from sin. Good works, even 
 merely ceremonial works, if performed from pure motives 
 and without any hope of rewards, form an excellent prepa- 
 ration for reaching that highest knowledge which it is the 
 final aim of the Vedanta to impart. And thus we read : 
 ' Brahmarcas seek to know Him by the study of the Veda, 
 by sacrifices, by charitable gifts' (Brih. Up. IV, 4, 22). 
 
 But when the knowledge of the highest Brahman has 
 once been reached or is within reach, all works, whether 
 good or bad, fall away. ' The fetter of the heart is broken, 
 
1 68 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY, 
 
 all doubts are solved, extinguished are all his works, when 
 He has been beheld who is both high and low' (MuraZ. 
 Up. II, *, 8). 
 
 Hence, to imagine that true Moksha can be obtained by 
 moral conduct alone is a mistake, while there are passages 
 in the Upanishads to show that some Vedantists taught 
 that a man who had reached Brahman and the highest 
 knowledge, was even in this life above the distinction of 
 good and evil, that is, could do nothing that he considered 
 good and nothing that he considered evil. Dangerous as 
 this principle seems to be, that whosoever knows Brahman 
 cannot sin/ it is hardly more dangerous, if properly under- 
 stood, than the saying of St. John (Ep. I, v. 68), that who- 
 soever is born of God, sinneth not. 
 
 The Two Brahmans. 
 
 It sometimes seems as if $amkara and Badarayawa had 
 actually admitted not only two kinds of knowledge, but 
 two Brahmans also, Sagunarn and NirguTiam, with or 
 without qualities, but this would again apply to a state of 
 Nescience or Avidya only; and it is in this sense alone 
 that Brahman also may be said to be affected by Avidya, 
 nay to be produced by Avidya, not by the Avidya of single 
 individuals, but by an Avidya inherent in sentient nature. 
 The true Brahman, however, remains always Nirgunam or 
 unqualified, whatever we may think about him ; arid as, 
 with regard to Brahman, to be conceived and to be is the 
 same thing, so likewise, so far as we are concerned, Brahman 
 is conceived by us and becomes to us qualified, active, crea- 
 tive and personal through the deception of the same uni- 
 versal and inevitable Avidya. In the same way the creation 
 of the world and of man is not the work of Brahman, but 
 the result of Avidya and of man while under her sway. 
 This ambiguity runs through the whole of the Vedanta, at 
 least according to the interpretation of /Samkara. 
 
 It will be seen how small a step it was from this view 
 to another which looked upon Brahman itself as affected 
 by Avidya, nay which changed this Avidya into a >S'akti 
 or potent ia of Brahman, thus lowering him, not raising 
 
THE TWO BRAHMANS. 169 
 
 him, to the character of an active creator. In full reality 
 Brahman is as little affected by qualities as our true Self 
 is by Upadhis (conditions), but the same Nescience which 
 clouds us for a time, clouds ipso facto Brahman also, Atman 
 (Crivatman) and Brahman being substantially A one. If the 
 qualified Brahman makes us, we, the qualified Atman, make 
 Brahman, as our maker. Only we must never forget that 
 all this is illusion, so that in truth we can predicate nothing 
 of Brahman but Na, na, i. e. No, no ; he is not this, he is 
 not that. He is, that is all we can say* and is more than 
 everything else. In that sense Brahman may be called both 
 Sat and A sat, being and not being, being in the highest 
 sense, not being, as different from all that the world calfe 
 being or true. If in the later Upanishads Brahman is called 
 Safc-Add-ananda, ' being, perceiving, and blessed/ then these 
 three predicates are in reality but one, for *he or it could 
 not be without perceiving itself (esse est percipere), and he 
 or it could not per'ceive himself or itself except as inde- 
 pendent, perfect, unaffected and untrammelled by anything 
 else ( Advitiya). Having no qualities, this highest Brahman 
 cannot of course be known by predicates. It is subjective, 
 and not liable to any objective attributes. If it knows, it 
 can only know itself, like the sun that is not lighted, but 
 lights itself. Our knowledge of Brahman also can only 
 be consciousness of Brahman as our own subjective Atman 
 or Self. 
 
 It seems only a concession to the prejudices, or let us say, 
 the convictions of the people of India, that an ecstatic per- 
 ception of Brahman was allowed as now and then possible 
 in a state of trance, such as the Yogins practised in ancient, 
 and even in modern times, though, strictly speaking, this 
 perception also could only be a perception of the Atman as 
 identical with Brahman. The fatal mistake which in- 
 terpreters of the Vedanta-philosophy both in India and 
 Europe have made is to represent this absorption or re- 
 covery (Samnullianaii), accomplishment) as an approach 
 of the individual soul towards God. There can be no 
 such approach where there is identity, there can only be 
 recovery or restitution, a return, a becoming of the soul 
 of what it always has been, a revival of its true nature. 
 
170 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Even Yoga, as we shall see, did not mean technically union, 
 nor Yogin a man united with God, but Yoga is effort, 
 towards Nirodha or suppression of Kiita, (the activity of 
 thought) (see Yoga-Sutras I, 2). 
 
 We shall thus understand the distinction which the Ve- 
 dantists and other Indian philosophers also make between 
 the Brahman, TO OVTMS ov, and the Brahman as Isvara, the 
 personal God, worshipped under different names, as creator, 
 preserver, and dissolver of the universe. This Isvara exists, 
 just as everything else exists, as phenomenally only, not as 
 absolutely real. Most important acts are ascribed to him, 
 and whatever he may appear to be, he is always Brahman,, 
 When personified by the power of Avidya or Nescience, 
 he rules the world, though it is a phenomenal world, and 
 determines, though he does not cause, rewards and punish- 
 ments. These are produced directly by the acts themselves. 
 But it is He through whose grace deeds are followed by 
 rewards, and man at last obtains true knowledge and 
 Mukti, though this Mukti involves by necessity the w disap- 
 pearance of Isvara as a merely phenomenal god. 
 
 It must be clear to any one who has once mastered the 
 framework of the true Vedaiita-philosophy, as I have here 
 tried to explain it, that there is really but little room in 
 it for psychology or kosmology, nay even for ethics. The 
 soul and the world both belong to the realm of things 
 which are not real, and have little if anything to do with 
 the true Vedanta in its highest and truest form. This 
 consists in the complete surrender of all we are and know. 
 It rests chiefly on the tremendous synthesis of subject and 
 object, the identification of cause and effect, of the I and the 
 It. This constitutes the unique character of the Vedanta, 
 unique as compared with every other philosophy of the 
 world which has not been influenced by it, directly or in- 
 directly. If we have once grasped that synthesis, we know 
 the Vedanta. All its other teaching flows naturally from 
 this one fundamental doctrine ; and though its carefully 
 thought out and worked out details are full of interest, 
 they contain no thoughts, so entirely new at the time when 
 they were uttered, as this identity of subject and object, or 
 this complete absorption of the object by this subject. 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND BELIGION, KAR.^AN. 
 
 Philosophy and Religion. 
 
 It is interesting to see how this very bold philosophy of- 
 the Vedanta was always not only tolerated, but encouraged 
 and patronised by religion and by its recognised repre- 
 sentatives. Nor did the Vedanta as a philosophy interfere 
 with popular religion; on the contrary, it accepted all 
 that is taught about the gods in the hymns and in the 
 BrahmaTi-as, and recommended a number of sacrificial and 
 ceremonial acts as resting on the authority of these hymns 
 and Brahmartas. They were even considered as a neces- 
 sary preliminary to higher knowledge. The creation of 
 the world, though not the making of it, was accepted as an 
 emanation from Brahman, to be followed in great periods 
 by a taking back of it into Brahman. The individual 
 souls also were supposed, at the end of each Kalpa, to Be 
 .drawn back into Brahman, but, unless entirely liberated, 
 to break forth again and again at the beginning of every 
 new Kalpa. 
 
 The individual souls, so far as they can claim any reality, 
 date, we are told, from all eternity, and not from the day 
 of their birth on earth. They are clothed in their Upadhis 
 (conditions) according to the merit or demerit which they 
 have acquired by their former, though long-forgotten, 
 acts. Here we perceive the principal moral element in the 
 ancient Vedanta, so far as it is meant for practical life, 
 and this doctrine of Karman or deed, to which we alluded 
 before, has remained to the present day, and has leavened 
 the whole of India, whether it was under the sway of 
 Brahmans or of Buddhists. The whole world, such as it 
 is, is the result of acts ; the character and fate of each man 
 are the result of his acts in this or in a former life, possibly 
 also of the acts of others. This is with them the solution 
 of what we venture to call the injustice of God. It is 
 their Theodicee. A man who suffers and suffers, as we say, 
 unjustly, seems to them but paying off a debt or laying up 
 capital for another life. A man who enjoys health and 
 wealth is made to feel that he is spending more than he 
 has earned, and that he has therefore to make up his debt 
 
172 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 by new efforts. It cannot be by a Divine caprice that one 
 man is born deaf or dumb or blind, another strong and 
 healthy. It can be the result of former acts only, whether, 
 in this life, the doer of them is aware of them or not. It 
 is not even necessarily a punishment, it may be a reward 
 in disguise. It might seem sometimes as if Avidya too, 
 which is answerable for the whole of this phenomenal 
 world, had to be taken as the result of acts far back before 
 the beginning of all things. But this is never clearly 
 stated. On the contrary, this primeval Avidy is left 
 unexplained, it is not to be accounted for, as little as 
 Brahman can be accounted for. Like Brahman it has to 
 be accepted as existent ; but it differs from Brahman in 
 so far as it can be destroyed by Vidygt, which is the eternal 
 life-spring of Brahman. The merit which can be acquired 
 by man even in this state of Avidya is such that he may 
 rise even to the status of a god, though for a time only, for 
 at the end of a Kalpa even gods like Indra and the rest 
 have to begin their career afresh. In fact it might be said 
 with some truth that Avidy is the cause of everything, 
 except of Brahman ; but that the cause of that primeval 
 Avidya is beyond our powers of conception. 
 
 Brahman is Everything 1 . 
 
 These powers of conception are real indeed for all 
 practical purposes, but in the highest sense they top are 
 phenomenal only. They too are but Namarftpa, name and 
 form; and the reality that lies behind them, the Atman 
 that receives thorn, is Brahman and nothing else. This 
 might become clearer if we took Brahman for the Kantian 
 Ding an sick, remembering only that, according, to the 
 Kantian philosophy, the Kupa, the forms of intuition and 
 the categories of thought, though subjective, are accepted 
 as true, while the Vedanta treats them also as the result 
 of Nescience, though true for all practical purposes in this 
 phenomenal life. In this sense the Vedanta is more scep- 
 tical or critical than even Kant's critical philosophy, though 
 the two agree with each other again when we remember 
 that Kant also denies the validity of these forms of per- 
 ception and thought when applied to transcendent subjects. 
 
THE STHULA- AND SUKSHMA-SARTBA. 173 
 
 According to Kant it is man who creates the world, as far 
 as its form (Namarftpa) is concerned; according to the 
 Vedanta this kind of creation is due to Avidya. And 
 strange as it may sound to apply that name of Avidya to 
 Kant's intuitions of sense and his categories of the under- 
 standing, there is a common element in them, though 
 hidden under different names. It would be natural to 
 suppose that this Atman within had been taken as a part 
 of Brahman, or as a modification of Brahman: but no. 
 According to &amkara the world is, as I tried to show 1 on 
 a former occasion, the whole of Brahman in all its integrity, 
 and not a part only ; only, owing to Avidya, wrongly 
 conceived arid individualised. Here we have in fact the 
 Holenmerian theory of Plotinus and of Dr. Henry More, 
 anticipated in India. If the Atman within seems limited 
 like the Brahman when seen in the objective world, this is 
 once more due to Avidya. Brahman ought to be omni- 
 present, omniscient, and omnipotent ; though we know but 
 too well that in ourselves it is very far from all this. 
 
 The Sthflla- and StLkshma-x&rira, 
 
 These are the conditions or Upadhis which consist of 
 Manas, mind, Indriyas, senses, Pranas, vital spirits, and the 
 Sarira, body, as determined by the outward world. This 
 Vedantie arrangement of our organic structure and our 
 mental organisation is curious, but it seems to have been 
 more or less the common property of all Indian philoso- 
 phers, and supplied by the common language of the people. 
 What is peculiar in it is the admission of a central organ, 
 receiving and arranging what has been conveyed to it by 
 the separate organs of sensQ. We have no word corre- 
 sponding to it, though with proper limitations we may 
 continue to translate it by mens or mind. It woi^ld repre- 
 sent perception as uniting and arranging the great mass 
 of sensations, but it includes besides Upalabdhi, perception, 
 Adhyavasaya, determination also, so far as it depends on 
 a previous interaction of percepts. Heuce a man is said 
 to see by the mind (Manas, vovs), but he may also be said 
 
 1 Theosophy, p. 280. 
 
I 74 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 to decide and act by the mind (Manas). All this may seem 
 very crude, leaving particularly the question of the change 
 of mere sensations into percepts (Vorstdlungen), a subject 
 so carefully elaborated by modern philosophers, and of per- 
 cepts into concepts, unapproached and unexplained. Here 
 the philosophy of Herbart would supply what is wanted. 
 He too, being opposed to the admission of various mental 
 faculties, is satisfied with one, the Manas, and tries to 
 explain all psychical phenomena whatever as the result of 
 the action and interaction of elementary Vorstellungen 
 (ideas or presentations). 
 
 By the side of the vital spirit, the Mukhya Pr&na, we 
 find a fivefold division into Prana, Upana, Vyana, Samana, 
 and Udana, meaning originally forth-, off-, through-, with-, 
 and out-breathing, but afterwards defined differently and 
 without much reference to any physiological data. This 
 also is a doctrine common to most systems of Indian philo- 
 sophy, though it is difficult to see by what physiological 
 observations it could have been suggested. 
 
 What is more interesting is the distinction between the 
 Sthftla- and Sftkshma-sarira, the coarse and the fine body, 
 the former the visible outward body; the latter invisible 
 and consisting of Mukhya Pra?ia, vital spirit, Manas, mind, 
 and Indriyas, organs of sense. This body is supposed to 
 remain after death, while the outer body is dissolved into 
 its material elements. The thin or subtle body, though 
 transparent or invisible, is nevertheless accepted as mate- 
 rial; and it is this Sukshma-sarfra which is supposed to 
 migrate after death from world to world, but, for the most 
 part, in an unconscious state. It is not like a human body 
 with arms and legs. 
 
 The Four States. 
 
 Here again we come across an original idea of Indian 
 philosophy, the doctrine of the four states, the state of 
 being awake, the state of dreaming, the state of deep and 
 dreamless sleep, to which is added A as the fourth, the state 
 of death. In the first state the Atman is supposed to be 
 
 Krceiving and acting by means of the Manas and the 
 driyas. In the second the Indriyas cease to act, but 
 
ESOHATOLOGY. 175 
 
 the Manas remains active, and the Atman, joined to the 
 Manas, moves through the veins of the body and sees 
 dreams made out of the remnants of former impressions 
 (Vasan&s). The third state arises from a complete separa- 
 tion of Atman from Manas and Indriyas. While these are 
 absorbed in the vital spirit, which remains in full activity, 
 the Atman in the heart is supposed to have for a time 
 become one with Brahman, but to return unchanged at the 
 time A of awakening. In the fourth or disembodied state 
 the Atman with the Sftkshma-sarira is supposed to escape 
 from the heart through a vein in the head or through the 
 hundred veins of the body, and then to take, according to 
 merit and knowledge, different paths into the next life. 
 
 Escbatology. 
 
 Such fancies seem strange in systems of philosophy like 
 the Ved&nta ; and, with the full recognition of the limits 
 of human knowledge, we can hardly understand how 
 Vedaritists accepted this account of the Sftkshma-sarira, 
 the circumstances attending the departure of the soul, in 
 fact, a complete Eschatology, simply on the authority of 
 the Veda. It is taken over from the Upanishads, and that 
 may be the : excuse for it. Vedantists had once for all 
 bound themselves to accept the Upanishads as revealed 
 truth, and the usual result followed. But we should see 
 clearly that, while much may be taken over from the Veda 
 as due to Avidya, we are here really moving in an Avidya 
 within that Avidya. For practical purposes Avidya may 
 often be called common sense, under its well-understood 
 limitations, or the wisdom of the world. But these dreams 
 about the details of a future life are a mere phantasmagoria. 
 They cannot even be treated as Naisargrka, or inevitable. 
 They are simply Mithyag/lana, fanciful or false knowledge, 
 if not that which is commonly illustrated by the son of 
 a barren woman that is, a self -contradictory statement 
 that kind at least which is unsupported by any evidence, 
 such as the horn of a hare. This is really a weakness that 
 runs through the whole of the Vedanta, and cannot be 
 helped. After the supreme and superhuman authority of 
 the Word or of the Veda had once been recognised, a great 
 
176 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 portion of the sacred traditions of the Vedic age, incor- 
 porated as they are in the hymns, the BrahmaTias, and the 
 Upanishads, had to be accepted with the rest, though ac- 
 cepted as part of the Apara Yidya, the lower knowledge 
 only. All the sacrificial rules, nay the very conception of 
 a sacrifice, had no place in the Para Vidya, or the highest 
 knowledge, because they involved, an actor and an enjoy er 
 of the fruits of such acts, and the truly enlightened man 
 cannot be either an actor or an enjoyer 1 . However, as 
 a preparation, as a means of subduing the passions and 
 purifying the mind by drawing it away from the low and 
 vulgar interests of life, all such commandments, together 
 with the promises of rewards vouchsafed to them, might 
 perhaps have been tolerated. But when we come to a full 
 description of the stations on the road by which the subtle 
 body is supposed to travel from the veins of this body to 
 the very steps of the golden throne of the Lower Brahman, 
 we wonder at the long suffering of the true philosopher 
 who has learnt that the true and highest knowledge of the 
 Vedanta removes in the twinkling of an eye (ApatataA) the 
 veil that in this life seems to separate Atman from Brah- 
 man. As these eschatological dreams have been included 
 in the Vedanta system, they had to be mentioned here, 
 though they are better studied in the pages of the Upani- 
 shads. 
 
 We are told there that, in the case of persons who have 
 fulfilled their religious or sacrificial duties and have lived 
 a good life, but have not yet reached the highest know- 
 ledge, the subtle body in which the Atman is clothed 
 migrates, carried along by the Udana through the Mftr- 
 dhanya N&di, the capital vein, following either the path of 
 the fathers (Pitriy&na) or the path of the gods (Devayana). 
 The former is meant for good people, the latter for those 
 who are good and have already reached the lower, if not 
 the highest knowledge. The former leads on to smoke, 
 night, the waning moon, the waning year, the world of the 
 fathers, the ether, and lastly the moon. In the moon the 
 departed souls remain for a time enjoying the rewards of 
 
 * See Sarnkara's Introduction to the Aitareya Upanishad. 
 
ESCHATOLOGY. 177 
 
 their good deeds, in company with the Pitn's, and then 
 descend again, supported by the remnant of unrewarded 
 merit due to their good works, to the ether, wind, smoke, 
 cloud, rain, and plants. From the plants springs seed 
 which, when matured in the womb, begins a new life on 
 earth in such a station as the rest of his former deeds 
 (Anusaya), Anlage, may warrant. As this is, as far as 
 I know, the earliest allusion to metempsychosis or fteelen- 
 wanderung, it may be of interest to see in what sense 
 /Samkara in his commentary on Sutra III, I, 22 took 
 it 1 : 
 
 'It has been explained/ he says, 'that the souls of 
 those who perform sacrifices, &c., after having reached the 
 moon, dwell there as long as their works last, and then 
 redescend with a remainder of their good works. We now 
 have to inquire into the mode of that descent. On this 
 point the Veda makes the following statement: "They 
 return again the way they came to the ether, from the 
 ether to the air (wind). Then the sacrificer having become 
 air becomes smoke, having become smoke he becomes mist, 
 having become mist he becomes a cloud, having become a 
 cloud he falls down as rain." Here a doubt arises whether 
 the descending souls pass over into a statQ of identity 
 (Sabhavyam) with ether, &e., or into a state of similarity 
 (Samyam) only. The Purvapakshin (opponent) maintains 
 that the state is one of identity, because this is directly 
 stated by the text. Otherwise there would take place 
 what is called indication only (Laksha?i&, i.e. secondary 
 application . of a word), and whenever the doubt lies be- 
 tween a directly expressed and a merely indicated meaning, 
 the former is to be preferred. Thus the following words 
 also, " Having become air ha becomes smoke," &c., are ap- 
 propriate only if the soul be understood to identify itself 
 with them. Hence it follows that the souls (of the de- 
 parted) become really identical with ether. To this we 
 ($arakara) reply that they only pass into a state of simi- 
 larity to ether, &c. When the body, consisting of water 
 which the soul had assumed in the sphere of the moon for 
 
 1 S.B.E., vol. xxxvii, Thibaut's translation. 
 12 N- 
 
i;8 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 the purpose of enjoyment, dissolves at the time when that 
 enjoyment comes to an end, then it becomes subtle like 
 ether, passes thereupon into the power of the air, and then 
 gets mixed with smoke, &c. This is the meaning of the 
 clauses, " They return as they came to the ether, from the 
 ether to the air," &c. How is this known to be the mean- 
 ing ? Because thus only is it possible. For it is not pos- 
 sible that one thing should become another in the literal 
 sense of the word. If, moreover, the souls became identified 
 wl'li ether, they could no longer descend through the air. 
 And as connection with the ether is, on account of its all- 
 pervadingness, eternal, no other connection (of the souls) 
 with if can here be meant, but their entering into a state 
 of similarity to it. In cases where it is impossible to accept 
 the literal meaning of the text, it is quite proper to assume 
 the meaning which is merely indicated. For these reasons 
 the souls' becoming ether, &c., has to be taken in the secon- 
 dary sense of their passing into a state of similarity to ether, 
 and so on/ 
 
 We see from this that $awkara believed in a similarity 
 only, an outward and temporary similarity between the 
 departed (in its Sftkshma-sartra) and the ether, air, mist, 
 cloud, and rain; and it is important to observe how, in 
 doing so, he violently twisted the natural meaning of 
 S&bhavya, the word used in the Sfttras, rather than alter- 
 ing a word of the Sfttra, and replacing S&bhavyam by 
 S&myam. 
 
 A similar difficulty arises again when it has to be deter- 
 mined whether the departed, in his further descent, actually 
 becomes a plant, such as rice, corn, sesamum, beans, &c., or 
 becomes merely connected with them. Samkara decides 
 strongly in favour of the latter view, though here again 
 the actual words of the S6tra have certainly to be twisted 
 by him ; nay, though Samkara himself has to admit that 
 other people may really, on account of their bad deeds, sink 
 so low as to become plants. He only denies this with re- 
 ference to the departed who, on account of their pious 
 works, have already reached the moon, and are after that 
 redescending upon earth. 
 
 Lastly, if it is said that the plant, when eaten, becomes 
 
ESCHATOLOGY. 179 
 
 a piogenitor, this also, according to tfamkara, can only 
 mean that it is joined with a progenitor. For the pro- 
 genitor must exist long before he eats the rice or the 
 beans, and is able to beget a child. Anyhow, the child 
 when begotten is the soul that had ascended to and 
 descended from the moon, and is born again according 
 to his former works. 
 
 I must confess that, though the Ved&ntists may be bound 
 by /Samkara's interpretation, it seems to me as if the author 
 of the Sfttras himself had taken a different view, and had 
 looked throughout on ether, air, mist, cloud, rain, plants as 
 the habitat, though the temporary habitat only, or the de- 
 parted in their subtle body \ 
 
 Little is said in the Upanishads of those who, owing to 
 their evil deeds, do not even rise to the moon and descend 
 again. But Badar&yaTia tries to make it clear that the 
 Upanishads know of a third class of beings (III, I, 12) 
 who reap the fruits of their evil actions in Samyamana 
 (abode of Yama) and then ascend to earth again. Theirs 
 is the third place alluded to in the Kh&nd. Upanishad V, 
 10, 8. 
 
 But while evil doers are thus punished in different hells, 
 as mentioned in the Puranas, and while pious people are 
 fully rewarded in the moon and then return again to the 
 earth, those who have been pious and have also reached at 
 least the lower knowledge of Brahman follow a different 
 road. After leaving the body, they enter the flame, the 
 day, the waxing moon, the waxing year (northern preces- 
 sion), the year, the world of the Devas, the world of V&yu, 
 air, the sun, the moon, and then lightning ; but -all these, 
 we are told, are not abodes for the soul, but guides only 
 who, when the departed has reached the lightning, hand 
 him over to a person who is said to be not-a-man. This 
 person conducts him to the world of Varuna, then to that 
 of Indra, and lastly to that of Pra(/apati or the qualified 
 Brahma. Here the souls are supposed to remain till they 
 realise true knowledge or the Samyagdarsana, which does 
 not mean universal, but thorough and complete knowledge, 
 
 1 See Vishwu Dh. S. XLIII, 45. 
 
 N 2 
 
ISO INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 that knowledge which, if obtained on earth, at once frees 
 a man from all illusion. Finally the souls, when fully re- 
 leased, share in all the powers of Brahrnan except those of 
 creating and ruling the universe. They are not supposed 
 ev.er to return to the world of Samsara (IV, 4, 17). 
 
 All this is hardly to be called philosophy, neither do the 
 different descriptions of the road on which the souls of the 
 pious are supposed to wander towards Brahrn&, and' which 
 naturally vary according to different schools, help us much 
 towards a real insight into the Vedanta. But it would have 
 been unfair to leave out what, 'though childish, is a charac- 
 teristic-feature of the Vednta-phtlosophy, and must be 
 judged- from a purely historical point of view. 
 
 Freedom in, this Life. 
 
 What is of importance to remember in these ancient 
 fancies is that the enlightened man may become free or 
 obtain Mukti even in this life (Givanmukti 1 ). This is 
 indeed the real object of the Vedknta-philosophy, to A over- 
 come all Nescience, to become once more what the Atman 
 always has been, namely Brahman, and then to wait till 
 death removes the last Up&dhis or fetters, which, though 
 they fetter the mind no longer, remain like Jbroken chains 
 hanging heavy on the mortal body. The Atman, having 
 recovered its Brahmahood, is even in this life so free from 
 " the body that it feels no longer any pain, and cannot do 
 anything, whether good or bad This has been always laid 
 hold of as the most dangerous doctrine of Vedantism, and no 
 doubt it may be both misunderstood and misapplied. But 
 in the beginning it meant no more than that the Atman, 
 which is above the distinctions of subject and object, of past 
 and present, of cause .and effect, is also by necessity above 
 the distinction of good and evil. This never was intended 
 as freedom in the sense of licence, but as freedom that can 
 neither lapse into sinful acts nor claim any merit for good 
 acts, being at rest and blessed in itself and in Brahman. 
 
 It is hardly necessary to say or to prove that the Vedanta- 
 philosophy, even in its popular form, holds out no en- 
 
 1 Vodanta-Sfctras III, 3, 28, 
 
FEE JB DOM IN THIS LIFE. l8l 
 
 couragement to vic$. Far from it. No one can even 
 approach it who hastoot previously passed through a course 
 01 discipline, whether as a student (Brahrna&arin) or as 
 a householder (GrihastKa). In order to make this quite 
 clear, it may be useful to add a few verses from one of the 
 many popular works intended to teach Vedanta to the 
 masses. It is Called the Mohamudgara, the Hammer of 
 Folly, and is ascribed to /Samkara. Though not strictly 
 philosophical, it may serve at least to show tjie state of 
 mind in which the true Ved&ntist is meant tov maintain 
 himself. It was carefully edited with Bengali, Hindi and 
 English translations by Durga Das Ray, and published at 
 Darjeeling in 1888. 
 
 ' Fool ! give up thy thirst for wealth, banish all desires 
 from thy heart. Let thy mind be satisfied with what is 
 gained by thy Karman. 
 
 Who is thy wife and who is thy son? Curious are the 
 ways of this world " Who art thou ? Whence didst thou 
 come ? Ponder on this, O Brother." 
 
 Do not be proud of wealth, of friends, or youth. Time 
 takes all away in a moment. Leaving all this which is 
 full of illusion, leave quickly and enter into the place of 
 Brahman. 
 
 Life is tremulous like a water-drop on a lotus-leaf. The 
 company of the good, though for a moment only, is the 
 only boat for crossing this ocean of the world 
 
 As is birth so is death, and so is th^ dwelling in the 
 mother's womb. Thus is manifest the misery of the world. 
 How can there be satisfaction here for thee, O Man ! 
 
 Day and night, morning and evening, winter and spring 
 come and go. Time is playing, life is waning yet the 
 breath of hope never ceases. 
 
 The bpdy is wrinkled, the hair grey, the mouth has 
 become toothless, the stick in the hand shakes, yet man 
 leaves not the anchor of hope. 
 
 To live under a tree of the house of the gods, to sleep 
 on the earth, to put on a goat-skin, to abandon all worldly 
 enjoyment ; when does such surrender not make happy ? 
 
 Do not trouble abgut enemy, friend, son, or relation, 
 whether for war or peace. Preserve equanimity always, if 
 
1 82 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 you desire soon to reach the place of Vishnu (Vishnu- 
 pada). 
 
 The eight great mountains, the seven oceans, Brahma, 
 Indra, the Sun and the Rudras, thou, I and the whole 
 world are nothing ; why then is there any sorrow ? 
 
 In thee, in me, and in others there dwells Vishnu alone, 
 it is useless to be angry with me and impatient. See every 
 self in Self, and give up all thought of difference. 
 
 The child is given to play, the youth delights in a beauti- 
 ful damsel, an old man is absorbed in cares no one clings 
 to the Highest Brahman. 
 
 Consider wealth as useless, there is truly no particle of 
 happiness in it. " The rich are afraid even of their son, this 
 is the rule established everywhere. 
 
 So long as a man can earn money, his family is kind to 
 him. But when his body becomes infirm through old age, 
 no man in the house asks after him. 
 
 Having given up lust, anger, avarice, and distraction, 
 meditate on thyself, who thou art. Fools without a know- 
 ledge oiHSelf are hidden in hell and boiled. 
 
 In these sixteen verses the whole teaching of the disciples 
 has been told. Those in whom this does not produce under- 
 standing, who can do more for them ? ' 
 
 Different Ways of Studying 1 Philosophy. 
 
 This may not be exactly moral teaching as we under- 
 stand it. But there are two ways of studying philosophy. 
 We may study it in a critical or in a historical spirit. 
 The critic would no doubt fasten at once on the superses- 
 sion of morality in the Vedanta as an unpardonable flaw. 
 One of the corner-stones, without which the grandest 
 pyramid of thought must necessarily collapse, would seem 
 to be missing in it. The historian on "the other hand will 
 be satisfied with simply measuring the pyramid or trying 
 to scale it step by step, as far as his thoughts will carry 
 him. He would thus understand the labour it has required 
 in building up, and possibly discover some counteracting 
 forces that rendjer the absence even of a corner-stone in- 
 telligible, pardonable, and free from danger. It is surely 
 astounding that such a system as the Vedanta should have 
 
DIFFERENT WAYS OF STUDYING PHILOSOPHY. 183 
 
 been slowly elaborated by the indefatigable and intrepid 
 thinkers of India thousands of years ago, a system that 
 even now makes us feel giddy, as in mounting the last 
 steps of the swaying spire of an ancient Gothic cathedral. 
 None of our philosophers, not excepting Heraclitus, Plato, 
 Kant, or Hegel, has ventured to erect such a spire, never 
 frightened by storms or lightnings. Stone follows on stone 
 in regular succession after once the first step has been 
 made, after once it has been clearly seen that in the 
 beginning there can have been but One, as there will be 
 but One in the end, whether we call it Atman or Brahman. 
 We may prefer to look upon the expansion of the world in 
 names and forms as the work of Sophia or as the realised 
 Logos, but we cannot but admire the boldness with which 
 the Hindu metaphysician, impressed with the miseries and 
 evanescence of this world, could bring himself to declare 
 even the Logos to be but the result of Avidya or Nescience, 
 so that in the destruction of that Avidya could be recog- 
 nised the highest object, and the summum bonum (Puru- 
 shartha) of man. We need not praise or try to imitate 
 a Colosseum, but if we have any heart for the builders of 
 former days we cannot help feeling that it was a colossal 
 and stupendous effort. And this is the feeling which 
 I cannot resist in examining the ancient Vedanta. Other 
 philosophers have denied the reality of the world as per- 
 ceived by us, but no one has ventured to deny at the same 
 time the reality of what we call the -Ego, the senses and 
 the mind, and their inherent forms. And yet after Jif ting 
 the Self above body and soul, after^ uniting heaven and 
 earth, God and man, Brahman and Atman, these 'Vedanta 
 philosophers have destroyed nothing in the life of the. 
 phenomenal beings who have to act and to fulfil their 
 duties in this phenomenal world. On the contrary, they 
 have shown that there can be nothing phenomenal without 
 something that is real, and thai? goodness and virtue, faith 
 and works, are necessary .as a preparation, nay as a sine 
 qud non. for the attainment of that highest knowledge 
 which brings the soul bstck to its source and to its home, 
 and restores it to its true nature, to its true Selfhood in 
 Brahman. 
 
184 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 And let us think how keenly and deeply Indian thinkers 
 must have felt the eternal riddles of this world before they 
 could propose so desperate a solution as that of the Vedanta; 
 how desperate they must have thought the malady of 
 mankind to be, before they could think of so radical a cure. 
 A student of the history of philosophy must brace himself to 
 follow those whom he wants to reach and to understand. He 
 has to climb like a mountaineer, undismayed by avalanches 
 and precipices. He must be able to breathe in the thinnest 
 air, never discouraged even if snow and ice bar his access 
 to the highest point ever reached by the boldest explorers. 
 Even if ne has sometimes to descend again, disappointed, 
 he has at all events strengthened his lungs and his muscles 
 for further work. He has done his athletic exercise, and 
 he has seen views such a& n.r x 3 never seen in the valleys 
 below. I am myself not a mountaineer, nor am I altogether 
 a Ved&ntist ; but if I can admire the bold climbers scaling 
 Mount Gaurf-Samkar, I can also admire the bold thinkers 
 toiling up to heights of the Vedanta where they seem lost 
 to us in clouds and sky. Do we imagine that these ascents 
 were undertaken from mere recklessness, from mere love of 
 danger? It ig easy for u6 to call those ancient explorers 
 reckless adventurers, or dispose of them with the help of 
 other names, such as mystic or pantheist, often but half 
 understood by those who employ them. The Vedantists 
 have often been called Atheists, but as the gods which they 
 denied were only Devas, or what we call false gods, they 
 might thus far have been forgiven. They have been called 
 Pantheists, though their theos, or their theoi, were not the 
 P&n, but the P&n was their theos. They have been called 
 Nihilists, but they themselves have drawn a sharp line 
 between the upholders of the $ftnya-v&da *, the emptiness- 
 doctrine, and their own teaching, which, on the contrary, 
 insists throughout on the reality that underlies all phe- 
 nomenal things,, namely Brahman, and inculcates the duties 
 which even thin world of seeming imposes on all who are 
 not yet in possession of the highest truth. That this 
 
 1 An important distinction between Buddhists and Vedantists is that 
 the former hold the world to have arisen from what is not, the latter 
 from what is, the Sat or Brahman. 
 
BAMANU0A. 185 
 
 phenomenal ivorld has no exclusive right to the name of 
 real is surely implied by its very name. Besides, whatever 
 perishes can never have been real. If heaven and earth 
 shall pass away ; if we see our body, our senses, and all 
 that has been built up on them, decaying and perishing 
 every day before our very eyes ; if the very Ego, the Aham, 
 is dissolved into the elements from. which it sprang, why 
 should not the Vedantist also have held to his belief that 
 Brahman alone is really, real, and everything else a dream ; 
 and that even the Nama-rupas, the words and things, will 
 vanish with each Kalpa ? 
 
 To sum up, the Vedanta teaches that in the highest 
 sense Creation is but Self-forgetfulness, and Eternal L^fe 
 remembrance or Self-consciousness. And while to us such 
 high abstractions may seem useless for the many, it is all 
 the more surprising that, with the Hindus, the fundamental 
 ideas of the Vedanta have pervaded the whole of their 
 literature, have leaventid the whole of their language, and 
 form to the present day the common property of the people 
 at large. No doubt these ideas assume in the streets a 
 different garment from what they wear among the learned 
 in the Asramas or the forests of the country. Nay even 
 among the learned few stand up for the complete Advaita 
 or Monism as represented by $arakara. 
 . The danger with $amkara's Vedantism was that what 
 to him was sim ply phenomenal, should be taken for purely 
 fictitious. There is, however, as great a difference between 
 the two as there is between Avidya and Mithyagwana. 
 Maya 1 is the cause of a phenomenal, not of a fictitious, 
 world : and if amkara adopts the Vivarta (turning away) 
 instead of the Pari/iama (evolution) doctrine, there is always 
 something on which the Vivarta or illusion is at work, and 
 which cannot be deprived of its reality. 
 
 R&m&niv/a. 
 
 There are schools of Vedantists who try to explain the 
 Sutras of Badarayarca in a far more human spirit. The 
 best known is the school of Ramanu^a, who lived in the 
 
 1 In the only passage where the Sfttras speak of Maya (III, a, 3), it 
 need not meato more than a dream. 
 
1 86 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 twelfth century A.D. l If we place $amkara's literary 
 activity about the eighth century -, the claim of priority 
 and of prior authority would belong to $amkara. But we 
 must never forget that in India more than anywhere else, 
 philosophy was not the property of individuals, but that, 
 as in the period of the Upanishads, so in later times also, 
 everybody was free to contribute his share. As we find 
 a number of teachers mentioned in the Upanishads, and as 
 they give us long lists of names, pupil succeeding teacher 
 through more than fifty spiritual generations, the com- 
 mentators also quote ever so many authorities in support 
 of the views which they either accept or reject. Hence we 
 cannot accept /Samkara as the only infallible interpreter of 
 the Vedanta-Sutras, but have to recognise in his commen- 
 tary one only of the many traditional interpretations of 
 the Sutras which prevailed at different times in different 
 parts of India, and in different schools. A most important 
 passage in this respect is that in which $arakara has to 
 copfess that others (apare tu vadinaA) differ from him, and 
 some, as he adds, even of our own (asmadiyas 7ca Kefcit) 3 . 
 This allows us a fresh insight into the philosophical life 
 of India which is worth a great deal, particularly a&j the 
 difference of opinion refers to a fundamental doctrine, 
 namely the absolute identity of the individual soul with 
 Brahman. $amkara, as we saw, was uncompromising on 
 that point. With him and, as he thinks, with Badarayawa 
 also, no reality is allowed to the soul (Atman) as an indi- 
 vidual (Criva), or to the world as presented to and by the 
 senses. With him the soul's reality is Brahman, and 
 Brahman is one only. But others, he adds, allow reality to 
 the individual souls also. Now this is the very -opinion 
 on which another philosopher, Ramanugra, has based his 
 own interpretation of Badaray ana's Sutras, and has founded 
 a large and influential sect. But it does not follow that 
 this, whether heretical or orthodox opinion, was really first 
 propounded by Ramanut/a, for Ramanu</a declares himself 
 dependent on former teachers (Pftrv^aryaA), and appeals 
 
 1 Wilson, Works, I, p. 35. 
 
 3 I-tsing, Introduction, p. xv, 788-820 A. D. ; Kumarila, 750 A. D. 
 
 3 S.B.E., XXXIV, p. xx, Thibaut. 
 
RAMANJtfA. 187 
 
 particularly to a somewhat prolix Sfttra-vritti by Bodha- 
 yana as his authority. Ramanu^a 1 himself quotes not only 
 Bodhayana, but after him Tanka, Dramida (or Dravida), 
 Guhadeva, Kapardin, Bharufci. One of them, Dravida, is 
 expressly said to have been anterior to $amkara, and so 
 must Bodhayana have been, if he is meant by the Vritti- 
 kara whom amkara himself criticises 2 . 
 
 We ought, therefore, to look on B&m&nu^a as a perfect 
 equal of $amkara, so far as his right of interpreting Bada- 
 rayaTia's Sfttras, according to his own opinion, is concerned. 
 It is the same here as everywhere in Hindu philosophy. 
 The individual philosopher is but the mouthpiece of tradi- 
 tion, and that tradition goes back further and further, the 
 more we try to fix it chronologically. While $amkara^s 
 system is Advaita, i. e. absolute Monism, that of Ramanugra 
 has been called Visishfa-Advaita, the doctrine of unity 
 with attributes or Monism with a difference. Of course 
 with R&manw/a also Brahman is the highest reality, omni- 
 potent, omniscient, but this Brahman is at the same time 
 full of compassion or love. This is a new and very im- 
 portant feature in Ramanuc/a's Brahman, as compared with 
 the icy self -sufficiency ascribed to Brahman by $amkara. 
 Even more important and more humanising is the recog- 
 nition that souls as individuals possess reality, that Kit 
 and A&it, what perceives and -what does not perceive, 
 soul and matter, form, as it were, the body of Brahman 3 , 
 are in fact modes (Prakara) of Brahman. Sometimes Kit 
 is taken for the Supreme Spirit as a conscious cause, A&it 
 for the unconscious effect or matter ; but there is always 
 Isvara as a third, the Lord ; and ^his, originally Brahma, is 
 later on identified without much ado with Vishnu, so that 
 Ramanu^a's sect is actually called $ri-Vaislmava. It 
 assumed no doubt the greatest importance as a religious 
 sect, as teaching people how to live rather than how to 
 think. But to us its chief interest is its philosophical 
 character, and more particularly its relation to the Bada- 
 rayana-Sutras and /S'amkara's explanation of them. 
 
 Brahman, whether under the name of Isvara, Vishnu, or 
 
 1 S.B.E., XXXIV, p. xxi. a Deussen, The Vedanta-Philosophy, p. 31. 
 
 8 Colebrooke, Misc. Assays, I, 439 n. 
 
1 88 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Vasudeva, or Bhagavat, is with Ramanugra as with /Sam- 
 kara both the efficient and the material cause of all that 
 exists, and he is likewise the lord and ruler of the world. 
 But here mythology comes in at once. From this Brah- 
 man, according to -Ramanu^ra, spring Samkarsha-na, the 
 individual soul (Criva), from Samkarsha^a Pradyumna, 
 mind (Manas), and from Pradyumna Aniruddha or the Ego 
 (Ahankara). Brahma, masc., here called Vasudeva, is-tnot 
 without qualities, as Samkara holds, but possesses (Wana 
 (knowledge), $akti (energy), Bala (strength), Aisvarya 
 (supreme power), Virya (vigour), and Tegras (energy) as his 
 Gunas or qualities. Much more of the same kind may be 
 found in Colebrooke l . 
 
 The real philosophical character of Ramanuc/a's Vedant- 
 ism has for the first time been placed in its true light by 
 Professor Thibaut, from whom we may soon expect a com- 
 plete translation of Ramanuga's own commentary on th.e 
 Vedanta-Sfttras, the ribhashya. As, according to Rama- 
 nw/a, Brahmi. A is not NirguTia, without qualities, such 
 qualities as intelligence, power, and mercy are ascribed to 
 him, while with $amkara even intelligence was not a 
 quality of Brahman, but Brahman was intelligence, pure 
 thought, and pure being. Besides these qualities, Brah- 
 man is supposed to possess, as. constituent elements, the 
 material world and the individual souls, and to act as the 
 inward ruler (Antaryamin) of them. Hence, neither the 
 world nor the individual souls will ever cease to exist. 
 All that Ramanu</a admits is that they pass through 
 different stages as Avyakta and Vyakta. As Vyakta, de- 
 veloped, they are what we know them to be on earth ; as 
 Avyakta they are enveloped (Samko/dta). This involution 
 takes place at the end of each Kalpa, when Brahman 
 assumes its causal state (K&raTiavastha), and when indi- 
 vidual souls and individual things lose for a time their 
 distinct and independent character. Then follows, by the 
 mere will of Brahma, the evolution, or the new creation of 
 #ross and visible matter, and an assumption by the indi- 
 vidual souls of new material bodies, according to the merit 
 
 1 Colobrookc, Misc. Essays, I, p. 439. 
 
KAMANU0A. 189 
 
 or demerit of their former existence. The important point 
 is that the individual souls, According to Ramanu#a, retain 
 their individuality even when they have reached the bliss- 
 ful abode of Brahman. The world is not considered by 
 him as merely the result of Avidya, but is real, while 
 Brahman is to be looked upon and worshipped as a personal 
 god, the creator and ruler of a real world. Tlfus tsvara, 
 the Lord, is not to be taken as a phenomenal god ; and the 
 difference between Brahman and tsvara vanishes, as much 
 as the difference between a qualified and an unqualified Brah- 
 man, between a higher and a lower knowledge. Here we 
 perceive the influence exercised on philosophy by the com- 
 mon sense or the common sentiment of the people. In 
 other countries in which philosophy is, as it were, the 
 private property of individual thinkers, that influence is 
 far less perceptible. But extreme views like those pro- 
 pounded by $amjcara were, as might be expected, too mu ch 
 for the great mass of the people, who might be willing to 
 accept the doctrines of the Upanishads in their vagueness, 
 but Who would naturally shrink from the conclusions 
 drawn from them with inexorable consistency by $amkara. 
 If it is impossible to say, as awkara says, '1 am not/ it is 
 difficult at least to say, ' I am not I/ but ' I am Brahman/ 
 It may be possible to say that tsvara or the Lord is Brah- 
 man ; but to worship Isvara, and to be told at the same 
 time that tavara is but phenomenal, must be trying even 
 to the most ardent of worshippers. If therefore Ramanu^a, 
 while professing his faith in the Upanishads and his alle- 
 giance to Badarayana, could give back to his followers not 
 only their own souls, but also a personal god, no wonder 
 that his success should have been so great as it was. 
 
 In the absence of any definite historical materials it is 
 auite impossible for us to say whether, in the historical 
 development of the Vedanta-philosophy at the time of 
 Badarayana and afterwards, it was the absolute Monism 
 as represented by $awkara that took the lead, or whether 
 the more temperate Monism, as we see it in Ramanu#a's 
 commentary, exercised an earlier sway. There are cer- 
 tainly some Sfttras which, as Dr. Thibaut has shown, lend 
 themselves far more readily to Ramanu^a's than to 
 
1 9O INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 $amkara's interpretation. The question as to the nature 
 of individual souls seems decided by the author of the 
 Sutras in favour of Ramanu#a rather than of $amkara. 
 We read in S&tra II, 3, 43, 'The soul is a part of Brahman/ 
 Here the soul is clearly declared to be a part of Brahman, 
 and this is the view of Ramanugra ; but $amkara explains it 
 by ' a part, as it were/ since Brahman, being not composed 
 of parts, cannot have parts in the literal sense of the word. 
 This seems ;a bold proceeding of /Samkara's ; and though 
 he tries to justify it by very ingenious arguments, Rama- 
 nugra naturally takes his stand on the very words of the 
 Sfttra. Similar cases have been pointed out by Dr. Thibaut ; 
 and this very diversity of opinion confirms what I re- 
 marked before, that the Ved&nta philosophers of India, 
 though they look both on Upanishads and the Sfttras as 
 their highest authorities, often present a body of doctrine 
 independent of them ; colonies, as it were, of thought that 
 had grown to be independent of the mother-country, but 
 are anxious nevertheless to prove that their own doctrines 
 can be reconciled with the old authorities. This W&s the 
 position assumed by Badarayatia towards the Upanishads, 
 so much so that nearly the whole of the first book of his 
 Sfttras had to be devoted to showing that his own views 
 of Brahman were not in conflict with certain passages in 
 the Upanishads. Some of theip may refer to the lower 
 Brahman, some to the individual soul as one with Brah- 
 man ; and it is on these points that, at a later time, $am- 
 kara and Ramanu^ra would naturally have differed. What 
 was important for BadarayaTia to show was that no pas- 
 sages from the Upanishads could fairly be quoted in 
 support of other philosophies, such as the Samkhya, of 
 which both $amkara and Ramanugra would disapprove. 
 In the same manner both &amkara and Ramanu</a are 
 anxious to show that they themselves are in perfect agree- 
 ment with Badarayawa. Both, however, approach the Sutras 
 as if they had some opinions of their own to defend and to 
 bring into harmony with the Sutras. We can only sup- 
 pose that schools in different parts of India had been grow- 
 ing up fast in the hermitages of certain teachers and their 
 pupils, and that all were anxious to show that they had 
 
RA MANTJ0A. 
 
 not deviated from such paramount and infallible autho- 
 rities as the Sutras and the Upanishads. This was done 
 by means of what is called Mimamsa, or a critical discus- 
 sion of passages which seemed to be ambiguous or had 
 actually been twisted into an unnatural meaning by impor- 
 tant teachers. 
 
 Dr. Thibaut l therefore seems to me quite right when he 
 says that both $amkara and Ramanuigfa pay often less 
 regard to the literal sense of the words and to tradition 
 than to their desire of forcing Badarayana to bear testi- 
 mony to the truth of their own philosophical theories. 
 This only confirms what I said before about the rich 
 growth of philosophical thought in India, independent of 
 Sutras and Upanishads, though influenced by both. Even 
 if we admit that BadarayaTia wished to teach in his Sutras 
 nothing but what he found in the Upanishads, it must not 
 be forgotten that the Upanishads contain ever so many 
 conflicting guesses at truth, freely uttered by thinkers 
 who had no personal relations with each other, and had no 
 idea of propounding a unifdrm system of religious philo- 
 sophy. If these conflicting utterances of the Upanishads 
 had to be reduced to a system, we can hardly blaine $am- 
 kara for his taking refuge in the theory of a higher and 
 a lower Brahman, the former being the Brahman of philo- 
 sophy, the other that of religion, and both, as he thought, 
 to be found in different parts of the Veda. By doing that 
 he avoided the necessity of arguing away a number of 
 purel y anthropomorphic features, incongruous, if applied to 
 the highest Brahman, and dragging down even the Brah- 
 man of the lower Vidya to a lower stage than philosophers 
 would approve of. Ramaiiu^a's Brahman is always one 
 and the same, and, according to him, the knowledge of 
 Brahman is likewise but one ; but his Brahman is in conse- 
 sequence hardly more than an exalted Lsvara. He is able 
 to perform the work of creation without any help from 
 Maya or Avidya ; and the souls of the departed, if only 
 their life has been pure and holy, are able to approach this 
 Brahma, sitting on his throne, and to enjoy their rewards 
 
 1 S.B.E., XXXIV, p.xcvi 
 
1 92 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 in a heavenly paradise. The higher conception of Brah- 
 man excluded of course not only everything mythological, 
 but everything like activity or workmanship, so that 
 creation could only be conceived as caused by May& l or 
 Avidya ; while the very idea of an approach of the souls 
 of the departed to the throne of Brahman, or of their soiuls 
 being merged in Brahman, was incompatible with the 
 fundamental tenet that the two were, and always remain, 
 one and the 3same, never separated except by Nescience,. 
 The idea of an approach of the soul to Brahman, nay, even 
 of the individual soul being a separate part of Brahman, to 
 be again joined to Brahman after death, runs counter to the 
 conception of Brahman, as explained by $amkara, however 
 prominent it may be in the Upanishads and in the system 
 of Ram&nu#a. It must be admitted therefore that in India, 
 instead of one Vedanta-philosophy, we have really two, 
 springing from the same root but extending its branches 
 in two very different directions, that of $amkara being kept 
 for unflinching reasoners who, supported by an unwavering 
 faith in Monism, do not shrink from any of its consequences ; 
 another, that of R&m&nugra, trying hard to reconcile their 
 Monism with the demands of the human heart that required, 
 and always will require, a personal god, as the last cause 
 of all that is, and an eternal soul that yearns for an 
 approach to or a reunion with that Being. 
 
 I am well aware that the view oif the world, of God, and 
 of the soul, as propounded by the Vedantists, whether in 
 the Upanishads or in the Sfttras and their commentaries, 
 has often been declared strange and fanciful, and unworthy 
 of the name of philosophy, at all events utterly unsuited 
 to the West, whatever may have been its value in the 
 East. I have nothing to say against this criticism, nor 
 have I ever tried to make propaganda for Vedantism, 
 least of all in England. But I maintain that it represents 
 a phase of philosophic thought which no student of philo- 
 sophy can afford to ignore, and which in no country can 
 be studied to greater advantage? than in India. And I go 
 even a step further. I quite admit that, as a popular philo- 
 
 1 Vcd Sutras II, a, 2, sub fine : Avidyapratyupasthapitanamarupama- 
 yavesavasena, 'Through l;oing possessed of the Maya of names and forms 
 brought near by Avidya.' 
 
EAMANU0A. 193 
 
 sophy, the Vedanta would have its dangers, that it would 
 fail to call out and strengthen the manly qualities required 
 for the practical side of life, and that it might raise the 
 human mind to a height from which the most essential 
 virtues of social and political life might dwindle away into 
 mere phantoms. At the same time I make no secret that 
 all my life I have been very fond of the Vedanta. Nay, 
 I can fully agree with Schopenhauer, and quite understand 
 what he meant when he said, ' In the whole world there 
 is no study, except that of the original (of the Upanishads), 
 so beneficiaj and so elevating as that of the Oupnekhat 
 (Persian translation of the Upanishads). It has been the 
 solace of my life, it will be the solace of my death/ 
 
 Schopenhauer was the last man to write at random, or 
 to allow himself to go into ecstasies over so-called mystic 
 and inarticulate thought. And I am neither afraid nor 
 ashamed to s&y that I share his enthusiasm for the 
 Vedanta, and feel indebted to it for much that has been 
 helpful to me in my passage through life. After all it is 
 not everybody who is called upon to take an active part in 
 life, whether in defending or ruling a country, in amassing 
 wealth, or in breaking stones ; and for fitting men to lead 
 contemplative and quiet lives, I know no better preparation 
 than the Vedanta. A man may be a Platonist, and yet a 
 good citizen and an honest Christian, and I should say the 
 same of a Vedantist. They may be called useless by the 
 busy and toiling portion of humanity; but if it is true 
 that 'those also serve who only stand and wait/ then 
 may we not hope that even the quiet in the land are not 
 . so entirely useless as they appear to be ? 
 
 And while some of the most important doctrines of the 
 Vedanta, when placed before us in the plain and direct 
 language of the Vedanta-Sutras, may often seem very 
 startling to us, it is curious to observe how, if clothed in 
 softer language, they do not jar at all on our ears, nay, are 
 in full harmony with our own most intimate convictions. 
 Thus, while the idea that our own self and the Divine 
 Self are identical in nature might seem irreverent, if not 
 blasphemous, one of our own favourite hymns contains the 
 prayer, 
 
 13 
 
194 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 And that a higher gift than gra< 
 
 Should flesh and blood refine, 
 God's Presence and His very Sellj 
 
 And Essence all-divine! 
 
 This is pure Vedanta. We also speak without hesitation 
 of our body, as the temple of God, and of the voice of God 
 within us; nay, 'we repeat with St. Paul that we live, and 
 move, and have our being in God, -yet we shrink from 
 adopting the plain and simple language of the Upanishads 
 that the Self of God and man is the same. 
 
 Again, the unreality of the material world, though 
 proved point by point by Berkeley, seems to many a pure 
 fancy; and yet one of our most popular poets, the very 
 type of manliness and strength, both mental and physical, 
 speaks like a Vecjantist of the shadows among which we 
 move : 
 
 For more than once when I 1 
 Sat all alone, revolving in myself 
 The word that is the symbol of myself, 
 The mortal limit of the Self was loosed, 
 And passed into the Nameless, as a cloud 
 Melts into Heaven. I touched my limbs the limbs 
 Were strange, not mine and yet no shade of doubt, 
 But utter clearness, and thro'* loss of Self 
 The gain of such large life as matched with ours 
 Were Sun to spark unshadowable in words, 
 Themselves but shadows of a shadow- world, 
 
 It would be easy to add similar passages from Words- 
 worth, Goethe, and others, to show that after all there is 
 some of the Indian leaven left in us, however unwilling we 
 may be to confess it. Indian thought will never quite 
 square with English thoughts, and the English words which 
 we have to adopt in rendering Indian ideas are never quite 
 adequate. All we can do is to strive to approximate as 
 near as possible, and not to allow these inevitable dif- 
 ferences to prejudice us against what, though differently 
 expressed, is often meant for the same. 
 
 There is one more point that requires a few remarks. 
 
 1 Tennyson, The Ancient Sage. 
 
METAPHORS. 1 95 
 
 Metaphors. 
 
 It has often been said that the Vedanta-philosophy deals 
 too much in metaphors, and that most of them, though 
 fascinating at first sight, leave us in the end unsatisfied, 
 because they can only illustrate, but cannot prove. This 
 is true, no doubt ; but in philosophy illustration also by 
 means of metaphors has its value, and I doubt whether 
 they were ever meant for more than that. Thus, when the 
 Vedanta has to explain how the Sat, the Real or Brahman, 
 dwells within us, though we cannot distinguish it, the 
 author of the JCA&ndogya Up. VI, 13, introduces a father 
 telling his son to throw a lump of salt into water, and after 
 some time to take it out again. Of course he cannot do it, 
 but whenever he tastes the water it is salt. In the same 
 way, the father says, the Sat, the Divine, is within us, 
 though we cannot perceive it by itself. 
 
 Another application of the same simile (Brihad. Ar. Up. 
 II, 4, 1 2) seems intended to show that the Sat or Brahman, 
 in permeating the whole elementary world, vanishes, so 
 that there is no distinction left between the individual Self 
 and the Highest Self *. 
 
 Again, when we read 2 that the manifold beings are pro- 
 duced from the Eternal as sparks spring from a burning 
 fire, we should remember that this metaphor illustrates 
 the idea that all created beings share in the substance 
 of the Supreme Being, that for a time they seem to be 
 independent, but that they vanish again without caus- 
 ing any diminution in the Power from whence they 
 sprang. 
 
 The idea of a creating as a making of the world is most 
 repugnant to the Vedantist, and he tries in every way to 
 find another simile by which to illustrate the springing of 
 the world from Brahman as seen in this world of Nescience. 
 In order to avoid the necessity of admitting something 
 extraneous, some kind of matter out of which the world 
 was shaped, the Upanishads point to the spider spinning 
 its web out of itself ; and, in order to show that things can 
 
 1 See Deussen, Upanishads, p. 41$, f.r a different explanation, 
 8 Brih. !r. Up. II, i, 20. 
 
 O 2 
 
196 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 spring into existence spontaneously, they use the simile of 
 the hairs springing from a man's head without any special 
 wish of the man himself. - 
 
 Now it may be quite true that none of these illustrations 
 can be considered, nor were they intended as arguments in 
 support of the Upanishad-philosophy, but they are at all 
 events very useful in reminding us by means of striking 
 similes of certain doctrines arrived at by the Vedanta 
 philosophers in their search after truth. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 Pftrva-Mimaros&. 
 
 IT would be interesting to trace at once the same 01 
 very similar tendencies to those of the Ved&nta in the 
 development of other Indian philosophies, and particularly 
 of the Samkhya and Yoga, and to see what they have to 
 say on the existence and the true nature of a Supreme 
 Being, and the relation of human beings to that Divine 
 Being, as shadowed forth in certain passages of the Veda, 
 though differently interpreted by different schools of philo- 
 sophy. But it seems -better on the whole to adhere to the 
 order adopted by the students of philosophy in India, and 
 trept of the other Mimamsa, the Purva-Mim&msa, that is 
 the Former Mimamsa, as it is called, in connection with 
 the one we have examined. The Hindus admit a Pftrva- 
 Mim&msa and an Uttara-Mirna?nsa. They look upon the 
 Ved&nta as the Uttara- or later Mimams&, and on that of 
 Craimini as the Pftrva-, or prior. These names, however, 
 were not meant to imply, as Colebrooke l seems to have 
 supposed, that the Pftrva-Mimamsji was prior in time, 
 though it is true that it is sometimes called Pr&M 2 , pre- 
 vious. It really meant no more than that the Pftrva- 
 MimUmsa, having to do with the KarmakaTidfa, the first 
 or work-part of the Veda, comes first, and the Uttara- 
 Mimams&, being concerned with the (?/7anakaraZa, comes 
 second, just as an orthodox Hindu at one time was 
 required to be a Grihastha or householder first, and then 
 only to retire into the forest and lead the contemplative 
 life of a Vanaprastha or a Samny&sin. We shall see, how- 
 ever, that this prior Mimamsa, if it can be called a philo- 
 sophy at all, is very inferior in interest to the Vedanta, 
 
 1 Colebrooke, Misc. Essays, vol. i, p. 239. Hitter, History of Philosophy, 
 vol. iv, p. 376, in Morrison's translation. 
 a Sarvadarsana-sawgraha, p. 122, 1. 3. 
 
198 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 and could hardly be understood without the previous 
 existence of such a system as that of Badaraya?ia. I should 
 not like, however, to commit myself so far as to claim 
 priority in time for the Vedanta. It has a decided priority 
 in importance, and in its relation to the Gf, ana-portion of 
 the Veda. We saw why the fact that Badaraya7ta quotes 
 ffaimini cannot be used for chronological purposes, for 
 (raimini returns the compliment and quotes Badarayaraa. 
 How this is to be accounted for, I tried to explain before. 
 It is clear that while Badarayarm endeavoured to intro- 
 duce order into the Upanishads, and to reduce their various 
 guesses to something like a system, (?aimini undertook to 
 do the same for the rest of the Veda, the so-called Karma- 
 k&nd& or work-portion ; that is, all that had regard to 
 sacrifice, as described chiefly in the Br&hina%as. Sacrifice 
 was so much the daily life of the Brahmans that the 
 recognised name for sacrifice was simply Karman, i.e. work. 
 That work grew up in different parts of India, just as we 
 saw philosophy springing up, full of variety, not free even 
 from contradictions. Every day had its sacrifi.ce, and in 
 some respects these regular sacrifices may be called the 
 first calendar of India. They depended on the seasons or 
 regulated the seasons and marked the different divisions of 
 the year. There were some rites that lasted the whole 
 year or even several years. And as philosophy existed, 
 independent of the Upanishads, and through Badarayawa 
 attempted to make peace with the TJpanishads, we must 
 consider that sacrifices ako existed for a long time without 
 the Brahma^as, such as we possess them ; that they grew 
 up without being restrained by generally binding authori- 
 ties of any kind ; and that at a later time only, after the 
 Brahman as had been composed and had acquired some 
 kind of authority, the necessity began to be felt of recon- 
 ciling variant opinions and customs, as embodied in the 
 Brahmawas and elsewhere, giving general as well as special 
 rules for the performance of every kind of ceremony. 
 We can hardly imagine that there ever was a time in 
 India when the so-called priests, settled in distant localities, 
 did not know how to perform their own sacrificial duties, 
 for who were the authors of them, if not the priests ? 
 
PURVA-MIMiafSA. 199 
 
 when the Brahmar?as once existed, a new problem had ^o 
 be solved: how to bring the BrahmaTias into harmony 
 with themselves and with existing family and local cus- 
 toms, and also how to discover in them a meaning that 
 should satisfy every new generation. This was achieved 
 by means of what is called Mimawisa, investigation, 
 examination, consideration. There is little room for real 
 philosophy in all this, but there are questions such as that 
 of Dharma or duty, including sacrificial duties, which offer 
 an opportunity for discussing the origin of duty and the 
 nature of its rewards ; while in accounting for seeming con- 
 tradictions and in arriving at general principles concerning 
 'sacrificial acts, problems would naturally turn up which, 
 though often in themselves valueless, are generally treated 
 with considerable ingenuity. In this way the work of 
 (?aimini secured for itself a place by the side of the works 
 ascribed to Badaraya^a, Kapila and others, and was actu- 
 ally raised to the rank of one of the six classical philo- 
 sophies of India. It cannot tKerefore be passed over in 
 a survey of Indian philosophy. 
 
 While Badaraya?m begins his Sfttras with Atiiato Brah- 
 ma$i$>?asa, * Now therefore the desire of knowing Brahman/ 
 (7aimini, apparently in imitation of it, begins with Athato 
 Dharmogrit/iz&sa, * Now therefore the desire of knowing 
 Dharma or duty/ The two words 'Now therefore' offer 
 as usual a large scope to a number of interpreters, but they 
 mean no more in the end than that now, after the Veda 
 has been read, and because it has been read, there arises 
 a desire for knowing the full meaning of either Dharma, 
 duty, or of Brahman, the Absolute ; the former treated in 
 the Uttara-, the latter in the Pfrrva-Mimamsa. In fact, 
 whatever native commentators may say to the contrary, 
 this first Sutra is not much more than a title, as if we 
 were to say, Now begins the philosophy of duty, or the 
 philosophy of (raimini. 
 
 Dharma, here translated by duty, refers to acts of pre- 
 scriptive observance, chiefly sacrifices. It is said to be 
 a neuter, if used in the latter sense, a very natural distinc- 
 tion, though there is little evidence to that effect in the 
 Sfttras or in the literature known to us. 
 
2OO INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 This Dharma or duty is enjoined in the Brahman as, and 
 these together with the Mantras are held to constitute the 
 whole of the Veda, so that whatever is not Mantra is 
 Brahma?m, whatever is not BrahmaTia is Mantra. The 
 Brahmawas are said to consist of Vidhis, injunctions, and 
 Arthavadas, glosses. The injunctions are meant* either to 
 make us do a thing that had not been done before, or to 
 make us know a thing that had not been known before 1 . 
 Subsequently the Vidhis 2 are divided into Utpatti-vidhis, 
 original or general injunctions, such as Agnihotram #uhoti, 
 he performs the Agnihotra, and Viniyoga-vidhi, showing 
 the manner in which a sacrifice is to be performed. The 
 latter comprises injunctions as to the details, such as 
 Dadhna guhoti, he performs the sacrifice with sour milk, &c. 
 Then follow the Prayoga-vidhis which settle the exact 
 order of sacrificial performances, and there is lastly a class 
 of injunctions which determine who is fit to perform a 
 sacrificial act. They are called Adhikara-vidhis. 
 
 The hymns or formulas which are to be used at a sacrifice, 
 though they are held to possess also a transcendental or 
 mysterious effect, the Apurva, are conceived by (7aimini as 
 mainly intended to remind the sacrificer of the gods who 
 are to receive his sacrificial gifts. 
 
 He likewise lays stress on what he calls Namadheya or 
 the technical name of each sacrifice, such as Agnihotra, 
 Darsapftrnamasa, Udbhid, &c. These names are found in 
 the Brahmawas, and they are considered important, as no 
 doubt they are, in defining the nature of a sacrifice. The 
 Nishedhas or prohibitions require no explanation. They 
 simply state what ought not to be done at a sacrifice. 
 
 Lastly, the Arthavadas are passages in the Brahmawas 
 which explain certain things ; they vary in character, being 
 either glosses, comments, or explanatory statements. 
 
 Contents of the P&rva-Mim&ms&. 
 
 Perhaps I cannot do better than give the principal con- 
 tents of (jaimini's Sutras, as detailed by Madhava in his 
 
 1 Rigvedabhashya, vol. i, p. 5. 
 
 2 Thibaut, Arthasamgraha, p. viii. 
 
CONTENTS OF THE JPUllVA-MIMAiSA. 2OI 
 
 Nyaya-mala-vistara l . The Mimamsa consists of twelve 
 books. In the first book is discussed the authoritative- 
 ness of those collections of words which are severally 
 meant by the terms injunction (Vidhi), explanatory passage 
 (Arthavada), hymn (Mantra), tradition (Srmiti), and name 
 (Namadheya). In the second we find certain subsidiary 
 discussions, as e. g. on Apurva, relative to the difference of 
 various rites, refutation of erroneously alleged proofs, and 
 difference of performance, as in obligatory and voluntary 
 offerings. In the third are considered revelation (Sruti), 
 * sign ' or sense of a passage (Linga), ' context ' (Vakya), &c., 
 and their respective weight, when in apparent opposition to 
 one another; then the ceremonies called Pratipathi-Kar- 
 mam, things mentioned by the way, Anarabhyadhita, things 
 accessory to several main objects, as Praya^as, &c., and the 
 duties of the sacrificer. In the fourth the chief subject is 
 the influence of the principal and subordinate rites on other 
 rites, the fruit produced by the Guhu when made of the 
 Butea frondosa, &c., and the dice-playing, &c., which forms 
 part of the Ra^asuya-sacrifice. In the fifth the subjects 
 are the relative order of different passages of the Sruti, &c., 
 the order of different parts of a sacrifice, as the seventeeq 
 animals at the Va#apeya, the multiplication and rion-multi- 
 plication of rites, and the respective force of the words of 
 the Sruti, the order of mention, &c., as determining the 
 order of performance. In the sixth we read of the persons 
 qualified to offer sacrifices, their obligations, the substitutes 
 for prescribed maiemls, supplies for lost or injured offer- 
 ings, expiatory rites, the Sattra-offeririgs, things proper to 
 be given, and the different sacrificial fines. In the seventh 
 is treated the mode of transference of the ceremonies of one 
 sacrifice to another by direct * command in the Vaidic text, 
 others as inferred by 'name' or 'sign/ In the eighth, 
 transference by virtue of the clearly expressed or obscurely 
 expressed ' sign ' or by the predominant ' sign/ and cases 
 also where no transference takes place. In A the ninth, the 
 discussion begins with the adaptation (Uha) of hymns, 
 
 1 See Cowell and Gough in then* translation of the Sarvadarsana- 
 samgraha, p. 178. 
 
2O2 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 when quoted in a new connection, the adaptation of Samans 
 and Mantras, and collateral questions connected therewith, 
 In the tenth the occasions are discussed where the non- 
 performance of the primary rite involves the * preclusion * 
 and non-performance of the dependent rites, and occasions 
 when rites are precluded, because other rites produce their 
 special results, also Graha-offerings, certain Samans, and 
 various other things, as well as different kinds of negation. 
 In the eleventh we find the incidental mention and subse- 
 quently the fuller discussion of Tantra. where several acts 
 are combined into one, and Avapa, or the performing an 
 act more than once. In the twelfth there is the discussion 
 on Prasanga,- when the rite is performed with one chief 
 purpose, but with an incidental further reference, on 
 Tantra, cumulation of concurrent rites (Sarnu&Maya), and 
 option. 
 
 It is easy to see from this table of contents that neither 
 Plato nor Kant would have felt much the wiser for them. 
 But we must take philosophies as they are given us ; arid 
 we should spoil the picture of the philosophical life of 
 India, if we left out of consideration their speculations 
 about sacrifice as contained in the Purva-Mimamsa. There 
 are passages, however, which appeal to philosophers, such 
 as, for instance, the chapter on the Pramanas or the authori- 
 tative sources of knowledge, on the relation between word 
 and thought, and similar subjects. It is true that most of 
 these questions are treated in the other philosophies also, 
 but they have a peculiar interest as treated by the ritualistic 
 Piirva-Mimamsa. 
 
 Pramanas of t?aimini. 
 
 Thus if we turn our attention first to the Pramanas, the 
 measures of knowledge, or the authorities to which we can 
 appeal as the legitimate means of knowledge, as explained 
 by the Ptirva-Mimamsa, we saw before that the VedanSsts 
 did not pay much attention to them,, though they were 
 acquainted with the three fundamental Praiuawas sense- 
 perception, inference, and revelation. The Purva-Mirnamsa, 
 on the contrary, devoted considerable attention to this 
 subject, and admitted five, (i) Sense-perception, Pratyaksha, 
 
SUTRA- STYLE. 203 
 
 when the organs are actually in contiguity with an object ; 
 (2) Inference (Anumana), i. e. the apprehension of an unseen 
 member of a known association (Vyapti) by the perception 
 of another seen member ; (3) Comparison (Upamana), know- 
 ledge arising from resemblance; (4) Presumption (Artha- 
 patti), such knowledge as can be derived of a thing not 
 itself perceived, but implied by another ; (5) $abda, verbal 
 information derived from authoritative sources. One sect 
 of Mimamsakas, those who follow KumarilaBhafta, admitted 
 besides, (6) Abhava, not-being, which seems but a subdivision 
 of inference, as if we infer dry ness of the soil from the not- 
 being or absence of clouds and rain. 
 
 All these sources of information are carefully examined, 
 but it is curious that Mimamsakas should admit this large 
 array of sources of valid cognition, considering that for 
 their own purposes, for establishing the nature of Dharma 
 or duty, they practically admit but one, namely scripture 
 or $abda. Duty, they hold, cannot rest on human authority, 
 because the 'ought* which underlies all duty, can only be 
 supplied by an authority that is more than human or more 
 than fallible, and such an authority is nowhere to be found 
 except in the Veda. This leaves, of course, the task 
 of proving the superhuman origin of the Veda on the 
 shoulders of (?aimini; and we shall see hereafter how he 
 performs it. 
 
 Before, however, we enter on a consideration of any of 
 the problems treated in the Purva-Mimamsa, a few remarks 
 have to be made on a peculiarity in the structure of the 
 Sutras. In order to discuss a subject fully, and to arrive 
 in the end at a definite opinion, the authors of the Sutras 
 are encouraged to begin with stating first every possible 
 objection that can reasonably be urged against what is their 
 own opinion. As long as the objections are not perfectly 
 absurd, they have a right to be stated, and this is called 
 the Purvapaksha, the first part. Then follow answers to 
 all these objections, and this is called the Uttarapaksha, 
 the latter part ; and then only are we led on to the final 
 conclusion, the Siddhanta. This system is exhaustive and 
 
204 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 has many advantages, but it has also the disadvantage, as 
 far as the reader is concerned, that, without a commentary, 
 he often feels doubtful where the cons end and the pros 
 begin. The commentators themselves differ sometimes on 
 that point. Sometimes again, instead of three, a case or 
 Adhikaraw-a is stated in five members, namely : 
 
 i. The subject to* be explained (Vishaya). 
 
 3. The doubt (Samsaya). 
 
 3. The first side or prima facie view (Purvapaksha). 
 
 4. The demonstrated conclusion (Siddhanta) ; and 
 
 5. The connection (Samgati). 
 
 This is illustrated in the commentary on the first and 
 second SMras of the Mima/msa \ which declares that a desire 
 to know duty is to be entertained, and then defines duty 
 (Charm a) as that which is to be recognised by an insti- 
 gatory passage, that is by a passage from the Veda. Here 
 the question to be discussed (Vishaya) is, whether the study 
 of Duty in Craimini's Mimamsa is really necessary to be 
 undertaken. The Purvapaksha says of course, No, for 
 when it is said that the Veda should be learnt (Vedo 
 *dhyetavya&), that clearly means either that it should be 
 understood, like any other book which we read, or that it 
 should be learnt by heart without any attempt, as yet, on 
 the part of the pupil to understand it, simply as a work 
 good in itself, which has its reward in heaven. This is 
 a very common view among the ancient Brahmans ; for, as 
 they had no written books, they had a very perfect system 
 for imprinting texts on the memory of young persons, by 
 making them learn every day a certain number of verses 
 or lines by heart, without any attempt, at first, of making 
 them understand what they learnt; and afterwards only 
 supplying the key to the meaning. This acquisition of the 
 mere sound of the Veda was considered highly meritorious ; 
 nay, some held that the Veda was more effieac'ous, if not 
 understood than if understood. This was in fact their 
 printing or rather their writing, and without it their 
 mnemonic literature would have been simply impossible. 
 
 1 Sarvadarsana-samgraha, p. iaa ; translation by Cowell and Gough, 
 p. 1 80 ; Siddhanta Dipika, 1898, p. 194. 
 
SUTRA-STYLE. 205 
 
 As we warn our compositors against trying to understand 
 what they are printing, Indian pupils were cautioned against 
 the same danger ; and they succeeded in learning the longest 
 texts by heart, without even attempting at first to fathom 
 their meaning. To us sucl\ a system seems almost in- 
 credible, but no other system was possible in ancient times, 
 and there is no excuse for being incredulous, for it may still 
 be witnessed in India to the present day. 
 
 Only after the text had thus been imprinted on the 
 memory, there came the necessity of interpretation or 
 understanding. And here the more enlightened of the 
 Indian theologians argue that the Vedic command ' Vedo 
 dhyetavyaA,' ' the yeda is to be gone over, that is, is to be' 
 acquired, to be learnt by heart/ implies that it is also to 
 be understood, and that this intelligible purpose is prefer- 
 able to the purely mechanical one, though miraculous 
 rewards may be held out for that. 
 
 But if so, it is asked, what can be the use of the 
 Mlm8tws&? The pupil learns the Veda by heart, and 
 learns to understand it in the house of his teacher. After 
 that -he bathes, marries and sets up his own house, so that 
 it is argued there would actually be no time for any inter- 
 vening study of the Mimamsa. Therefore the imaginary 
 opponent, the Purvapakshin, objects that the study of the 
 Mim&msa is not necessary at all, considering that it rests 
 on no definite sacred command. But here the Siddh&ntin 
 steps forward and says that the Smr?^ti passage enjoining 
 a pupil's bathing (graduating) on returning to his house is 
 net violated by an intervening study of the Mimamsa, 
 because it is not said that, after having finished his 
 apprenticeship, he should immediately bathe ; and because, 
 though his learning of the text of the Veda is useful in 
 every respect, a more minute study of the sacrificial pre- 
 cepts of the Veda, such as is given in the Mimamsa, cannot 
 be considered superfluous, as a means towards the highest 
 object of the study of the Veda, viz. the proper performance 
 of its commands. 
 
 These considerations in support of the Siddhanta or final 
 conclusion would probably fall under the name of Samgati, 
 connection, though I must confess that its meaning is not 
 
2O6 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 quite clear to me. There are besides several points in the 
 course of this discussion, such as, for instance, the so-called 
 four Kriyaphalas, on which more information is much to 
 be desired. 
 
 Has the Veda a Superhuman Origin? 
 
 This discussion leads on to another and more important 
 one, whether the Veda has supreme authority, whether it 
 is the work of man, or of some inspired person, or whether 
 it is what we should call revealed. If it were the work 
 of a person, then, like any other work, it could not establish 
 a duty, nor could it promise any rewards as a motive for 
 the performance of any duty; least of all, a reward in 
 heaven, such as the Veda promises again and again to 
 those who perform Vedic sacrifices. It follows therefore 
 either that the Veda has no binding authority at all, or that 
 it cannot be the work of a personal or human author. This 
 is a dilemma arising from convictions firmly planted in the 
 minds of the ancient theologians of India, and it is interest- 
 ing to see how they try to escape from all the difficulties 
 arising out of their postulate that the Veda must be the 
 work of a superhuman or divine author. The subject is 
 interesting even though the arguments may not be con- 
 vincing to us. It is clear that even to start such a claim 
 for any book as being revealed requires a considerable 
 advance in religious and philosophical thought, and I doubt 
 whether such a problem could have arisen in the ancient 
 literature of any country besides India. The Jews, no 
 doubt, had their sacred books, but these books, though 
 sacred, were not represented as having been the work of 
 Jehovah. They were acknowledged to have been com- 
 posed, if not written down, by historical persons, even if, 
 as in the case of Moses, they actually related the death 
 of their reputed author. The Mimamsa philosopher would 
 probably have argued that as no writer could relate his 
 own death, therefore Deuteronomy must be considered the 
 work of a superhuman writer ; and some of our modern 
 theologians have not been very far from taking the same 
 view. To the Brahmans, any part of the Veda, even if it 
 bore a human or historical name, was superhuman, eternal 
 
HAS THE VEDA A SUPERHUMAN ORIGIN? 
 
 and infallible, much as the Gospels are in the eyes of 
 certain Christian theologians, even though they maintain 
 at the same time that they are historical documents written 
 down by illiterate people, or by apostles such as St. Mark 
 or St. John. Let us see therefore how the Mimamsa deals 
 with this problem of the Apaurusheyatva, i.e. the non- 
 human origin of the Vedas. Inspiration in the ordinary 
 sense of the word would not have satisfied these Indian 
 orthodox philosophers, for, as they truly remark, this would 
 not exclude the possibility of error, because, however true 
 the message might be, when given, the human recipient 
 would always be a possible source of error, as being liable 
 to misapprehend and misinterpret such a message. Even 
 the senses, as they point out, can deceive us, so that we 
 mistake mother-of-pearl for silver ; how much more easily 
 then may we misapprehend the meaning of revealed 
 words ! 
 
 However, the first thing is to see how the Brahmans, and 
 particularly the Mimamsakas, tried to maintain a super- 
 human authorship in favour of the Veda. 
 
 I quote from Madhava's introduction to his commentary 
 on the Rig-veda 1 . He is a great authority in matters 
 connected with the Pftrva-Mimamsa, having written the 
 Nyaya-mal&-vistara, a very comprehensive treatise on the 
 subject. In his introduction he establishes first the authority 
 of the Mantras and of the Brahmawas, both Yidhis (rules) 
 and Arthavadas (glosses), by showing that they were per- 
 fectly intelligible, which had been denied. He then pro- 
 ceeds to establish the Apaurusheyatva, the non-human 
 authorship of the Veda, in accordance, as he says, with 
 (?aimini's Sfttras. 
 
 * Some people/ he says, and he means of course the Pftrva- 
 pakshins, the recognised objectors, ' uphold approximation 
 towards the Vedas/ that is to say, they hold that as the 
 Raghuvamsa of KalidAsa and other poems are recent, so 
 also are the Vedas. The Vedas, they continue", are not 
 without a beginning or eternal, and hence we find men 
 quoted in them as the authors of the Vedas. As in the 
 
 J See my Second Edition, vol. i, p. 10. 
 
208 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 case of Vyasa's Mahabharata and Valmiki's Ram&yawa, 
 Vyasa, Valmiki, &c., are known to be their human authors, 
 thus in the case of the KltfAaka, Kauthuma, Taittiriya, 
 and other sections of the Veda, KaAa, &c., are given us as 
 the names of the authors of these brandies of the Veda ; 
 and hence it follows that the Vedas were the works of 
 human authors. 
 
 And if it were suggested that such names as Katta, &c., 
 were meant for men who did no more than hand down the 
 oral tradition, like teachers, the Purvapakshin is ready 
 with a new objection, namely, that the Vedas must be of 
 human origin, because we see in the Vedas themselves the 
 mention of temporal matters. Thus we read of a Babara 
 PravahaTii, of a Kusuruvinda Auddalaki, &t. The Vedas, 
 therefore, could not have existed in times anterior to these 
 persons mentioned in them, and hence cannot be prehistoric, 
 pre-temporal, or eternal. It is seen from this that what is 
 claimed for the Veda is not only revelation, communicated 
 to historical persons, but existence from all eternity, and 
 before the beginning of all time. We can understand there- 
 fore why in the next Sutra, which is the Siddhanta or final 
 conclusion, Gaimini should appeal to a former Sutra in 
 which he established that even the relation of words to 
 their meanings is eternal. This subject had been discussed 
 before, in answer to the inevitable Objector-general, the 
 Purvapakshin, who had maintained that the relation between 
 words and their meanings was conventional (foWi), estab- 
 lished by men, and therefore liable to error quite as much 
 as the evidence of our senses. For as we may mistake 
 mother-of-pearl for silver, we may surely mistake the 
 meaningLof words, and hence the meaning of words of the 
 Veda also. Craimini, therefore, in this place, wishes us first 
 of all to keep in mind that the words of the Vedas them- 
 selves are superhuman or supernatural, nay, that sound 
 itself is eternal ; and thus fortified lie next proceeds to answer 
 the objections derived from such names as Kanaka, or 
 Babara PrivahaTM. This is done by showing that K&thn, 
 did not compose, but only handed down a certain portion 
 of the Veda, and that Babara PravAhani wa& meant, not as 
 the name of a man, but as a name of the wind, Babara 
 
HAS THE VEDA A SUPERHUMAN OBtGIN ? 
 
 imitating the sound, and Pravahana meaning 'carrying 
 along/ as it were pro-vehens. 
 
 Then follows a new objection taken from the fact that 
 impossible or even absurd things occur in the Veda; for 
 instance, we read that trees or serpents performed a sacri- 
 fice, or that an old ox sang foolish 3 songs fit for the Madras. 
 Hence it is argued once more that the Veda must have 
 been made by human beings. But the orthodox traimini 
 answers, No ; for if it had been made by man, there could 
 be no injunction for the performance of sacrifices like the 
 (?yotishoma, as a means of attaining Svarga or paradise, 
 because no man could possibly know either the means, or 
 their effect ; and yet there is this injunction in the case of 
 the Cryotishfoma, and other sacrifices are not different from 
 it. Such injunctions as ' Let a man who desires paradise, 
 sacrifice with the (?yotishtoma ' are not like a speech of 
 a madman; on the contrary, they are most rational in 
 pointing out the object (paradise), in suggesting the me"ans 
 (Soma, &c.), and in mentioning all the necessary subsidiary 
 acts (Dikshaniya, &c.). We see, therefore, that the com- 
 mands of the Veda are not unintelligible or absurd. And 
 if we meet with such passages as that the trees and serpents' 
 performed certain sacrifices, we must recognise in them 
 Arthavadas or glosses, conveying in our case indirect laucfo- 
 tions of certain sacrifices, as if to say, * if even trees an4 
 serpents perform them, how much more should intelligent 
 beings do the same ! ' 
 
 ^ As, therefore, no flaws that might arise from human 
 workmanship can be detected in the Veda, (?aimini concludes 
 triumphantly that its superhuman origin and its authority 
 cannot be doubted. 
 
 This must suffice to give a general idea of the character 
 of the Pftrva-Mim&wsa. We may wonder why it should 
 ever have been raised to the rank of a philosophical system 
 by the side of the Uttara-Mimamsa or the Vedanta, but it 
 is its method rather than the matter to which it is applied, 
 that seems to have invested it with a certain importance. 
 This Mim&msa method of discussing questions has been 
 
 1 On Mftdraka, see Muir, Sansk. Texts, IT, p. 482. 
 14 P 
 
2IO INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 adopted in other branches of learning also, for instance, by 
 the highest legal authorities in trying to settle contested 
 questions of law. We meet with it in other systems of 
 philosophy also as the recognised method of discussing 
 various opinions before arriving at a final conclusion. 
 
 Thre are some curious subjects discussed by (?aimim, 
 such as what authority can be claimed for tradition, as 
 different from revelation, how far the recognised customs 
 of certain countries should be followed or rejected, what 
 words are to be considered as correct or incorrect. ; or again, 
 how a good or bad act, after it has been performed, can, in 
 spite of the lapse of time, produce good or bad results for 
 the performer. All this is certainly of interest to the 
 student of Indian literature, but hardly to the student of 
 philosophy, as such. 
 
 Supposed Atheism of I 
 
 One more point seems to require our attention, namely. 
 the charge of atheism that has been brought against 
 Craiiinni's Mimamsa. This sounds a very strange charge 
 after what we have seen of the character of this philosophy, 
 of its regard for the Veda, and the defence of its revealed 
 character, nay, its insistence on the conscientious observance 
 of all ceremonial injunctions. Still, it has been broitght 
 both in ancient and in modern times. So early a philo- 
 sopher as Kumarila Bhafta tells us that the Mima/msl had 
 been treated in the world as a Lokayata l , i\ e. an atheistic 
 system, but that he was anxious to re-establish it as 
 orthodox. Professor Banerjea 2 tells us that Prabhakara 
 also, the other commentator of the MimawsA, had openly 
 treated this system as atheistic, and we shall meet with 
 H passage from the Padrna-Pura-rJa supporting the same 
 view. However, there seems to be a misunderstanding 
 here. Atheistic has always meant a great many things, 
 so much so that even the most pantheistic system that 
 could be imagined, the Vedanta, has, like that of Spinoza, 
 
 1 Lok&ynta is explained by Childor*, P.V., as controversy on fabulous 
 or alimird points, l\it in the Ambn////a-Sutta. I, 3, it is mentioned as 
 forming }>url of the studicfl proper for :i Brahman. 
 
 * MUJI, n r, 95. 
 
SUPPOSED ATHEISM OF P$RVA-MlMiU/SA. 21 I 
 
 been accused of atheism. The reason is this. The author 
 of the Vedfinta-Sfttras, Badarayayia. after having established 
 the omnipresence of Brahman (III, 2, 36-37) by quoting a 
 number of passages from the Veda, such as ' Brahman is 
 all this' (Mum/. Up. II, 2, n), 'the Self is all this' (JSfMnd. 
 Up. VII, 25, 2), proceeds to show (III, 2, 38) that the re- 
 wards also of all works proceed directly or indirectly from 
 Brahman. There were, however, two opinions on this 
 point, one, that the works themselves produce their fruit 
 without any divine interference, and in cases where the 
 fruit does not appear at once, that there is a supersensuous 
 principle, called Ap&rva, which is the direct result of a deed, 
 and produces fruit at a later time; the other, that all 
 actions are directly or indirectly requited by the Lord. 
 The latter opinion, which is adopted by Baaaraya??a, is 
 supported by a quotation from Brih. Up. IV, 4, 24, ' This is 
 indeed the great, unborn Self, the giver of food, the giver 
 of wealth/ (raimini, however, as we are informed by 
 Badarayaim in the next Sutra, accepted the former opinion. 
 The command that 'he who IB desirous of the heavenly 
 world should sacrifice,' implies, as he holds, a reward of 
 the sacrificer by moans of the sacrifice itself, and not by 
 any other agent. But how a sacrifice, when it had been 
 performed and was ended, could produce any reward, is 
 difficult to understand. In order to explain this, (raimini 
 assumes that there was a result, viz. an invisible something/ 
 a kind of after-state of a deed or an invisible antecedent, 
 state of the result, something Apurva or miraculous, which 
 represented the reward inherent in good works. And ho 
 adds, that if we supposed that the Lord, himself cancel 
 rewards and punishments for the acts of men, we should 
 often have to accuse him of cruelty and partiality; and 
 that it is better therefore to allow that all works, good or 
 bad, produce their own results, or, in other words, that for 
 the moral government of the world no Lord is wanted. 
 
 Here, then, we see the real state of the case as between 
 (raimini and BAdarayatia. ffaimini would not make the 
 Lord responsible for the injustice that seems to prevail in 
 the world, and hence reduced everything to rause and 
 effect, and saw in the inequalities of the world the natural 
 
 v 2 
 
212 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 result of the continued action of good or evil acts. This 
 surely was not atheism, rather was it an attempt to clear 
 the Lord from those charges of cruelty or undue partiality 
 which have so often been brought against him. It was 
 but another attempt at justifying the wisdom of God, an 
 ancient Theodice'e, that, whatever we may think of it, 
 certainly did not deserve the name of atheism. 
 
 Badarayam, however, thought otherwise, and quoting 
 himself, he says, c Badaraya?ia thinks the Lord to be the 
 cause of the fruits of action/ and lie adds that he is even 
 the cause of these actions themselves, as we may learn 
 from a well-known Vedic passage (Kaush. Up. Ill, 8) : ' He 
 makes whomsoever he wishes to lead up from these worlds, 
 do good deeds; and makes him whom he wishes to lead 
 down from these worlds, do bad deeds/ 
 
 Atheism is a charge very freely brought against those 
 who deny certain characteristics predicated of the Deity, 
 but do not mean thereby to deny His existence. If the 
 Mimamsakas were called atheists, it meant no more than 
 that they tried to justify the ways of God in thir own 
 way. But, once having been called atheists, they were 
 accused of eve*r so many things. In a passage quoted by 
 Professor Banerjea from a modern work, the Vidvan- 
 modatarangi??,i, we read: 'They say ther^e is no God, or 
 maker of the world ; nor has the world any sustainer or 
 destroyer; for every man obtains a recompense in con- 
 formity with his own works. Neither is there any maker 
 of the Veda, for its words are eternal, and their arrange- 
 ment is eternal. Its authoritativeness is self -demonstrated, 
 for since it has been established from all eternity how can 
 it be dependent) upon anything but itself ?' This shows 
 how the Mimamsakas have been misunderstood by the 
 Vedantists, and how much $amkara is at cross-purposes 
 with ffaimini. What has happened in this case in India 
 is what always happens when people resort to names of 
 abuse rather than to an exchange of ideas. Surely a Deity, 
 though He does not cause us to act/ and does not Himself 
 reward or punish us, is not -thereby a non-existent Deity. 
 Modern Vedantists also are so enamoured of\ their own 
 conception of Deity, that is, of Brahinan or Atman, that 
 
IS THE PURVA-M1MAJ/SA A SYSTEM 0* PHILgSOPIJY \ 213 
 
 they do not hesitate, like Vivekananda, for instance, in his 
 recent address 011 Practical Vedanta, 1896, to charge those 
 who differ from himself with atheism. * He is the atheist/ 
 he writes, ' who does not believe in himself. Not believing 
 in the glory of your own soul is what the Vedanta calls 
 atheism/ 
 
 Is the Pfcrva-Mimamsa a system of Philosophy? 
 
 Let me say once more that, in allowing a place to the 
 Purva-Mimamsa among the six systems of Indian Philo- 
 sophy, 1 was chiefly influenced by the fact that from an 
 Indian point of view it always held such a place, and that 
 by omitting it a gap would have been left in the general 
 outline of the philosophic thought of India. Some native 
 philosophers go so far as not only to call both systems, 
 that of Craiinini and Badaraya7ia, by the same name of 
 Miinamsa, but to look upon them as forming one whole. 
 They actually take the words in the first Sutra of the 
 Vedanta-philosophy, 'Now then a desire to know Brahman/ 
 as pointing back to Craimini's Sutras and as thereby im- 
 plying that the Purva-Mimamsa should be studied first, 
 and should be followed by a study of the Uttara-Mimamsa 
 afterwards. Besides, the. authors of the other five systems 
 frequently refer to Graimini as an independent thinker, and 
 though his treatment of the sacrificial system of the Veda 
 would hardly seem to us to deserve the name of a system 
 of philosophy, "he has nevertheless touched on many a 
 problem which falls clearly within frhat sphere of thought. 
 Our idea of a system of philosophy is different from the 
 Indian conception of a Dar^ana. In its original meaning 
 philosophy, as a love of wisdom, comes nearest to the 
 Sanskrit (?ic//7asa, a desire to know, if not a desire to be 
 wise. If we take philosophy in the sense of an examination 
 of our means of knowledge (Epistemology), or with Kant 
 as an inquiry into the limits of human knowledge, there 
 would be nothing corresponding to it in India. Even the 
 Vedanta, so far as it is based, not on independent reasoning, 
 but on the authority .of the >S Y ruti, would lose with us its 
 claim to the title of 'philosophy. But we have only to 
 waive the claim of infallibility put forward by Badaraya/w* 
 
214 INDIAN rillLOBOPHY. 
 
 in favour 01 the utterances of the sages of the Upanishads, 
 and treat them as simple human witnesses to the truth, 
 and we should then find in the systematic arrangement of 
 these utterances by Badaraya/ia, a real philosophy, a com- 
 plete view of the Kosmos in which we live, like those that 
 have been put forward by the great thinkers of the philo- 
 sophical countries of the world, Greece, Italy, Germany, 
 France, and England. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 HAVING explored two of the recognised systems of Indian 
 philosophy, so far as it seemed necessary to a general survey 
 of the work done by the ancient thinkers of India, we must 
 now return and enter once more into the densely outaugled 
 and almost impervious growth of thought from which aii 
 the high roads leading towards real and definite systems 
 of philosophy have emerged, brandling oft in different 
 directions. One of these and, as it seems to me, by j'a-r the 
 most important for the whole intellectual development of 
 India, the Vedanta, has been mapped out by us at least in 
 its broad outlines. 
 
 It seemed to me undesirable to enter here on an examina- 
 tion of what has been called the later Vedtmta which can 
 bo studied in such works as the Pau&ada&i or the Vedanta - 
 Sara, and in many popular treatises both in prose and in 
 verse. 
 
 &ater Yed&nta mixed with S&wfcfcye,, 
 
 It would be unfair and unhistorical, however, to look 
 upon this later development of the Vedanta as aiinply 
 a deterioration of 1 the old philosophy. Though it 'is cer- 
 tainly rather confused, if compared with the system as laid 
 down in the old Vedanta-Sutras, it represents to us what 
 in the course of time became of the Vedanta, when taught 
 and discussed in the dijierent schools of philosophy in 
 medieval and modern India. What strikes us most in it is 
 the mixture of Vedaata ideas with ideas borrowed chiefly, 
 a.s it would vse^m, from Sfu/tkhya, but also from Yoga, and 
 Nyaya sources. 15ut here again it is difficult to decide 
 whether such ideas were actually borrowed from these 
 systems in their finished state, or whether they were 
 originally common property which in later times only had 
 restricted to one or the other of the six systems of 
 
2l6 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 philosophy. In the Pa 7/cadasi, for instance, we meet with 
 the idea of Prakriti, nature, which we are accustomed to 
 consider as the peculiar property of the Samkhya-system. 
 This Prakriti is said there to be the reflection, or, as we 
 should say, the shadow of Brahman, and to be possessed of 
 the three Gu?ias or elements of goodness, passion, and 
 darkness, or, as they are sometimes explained, of good, 
 indifferent, and bad. This theory of the three Gunas, how- 
 ever, is altogether absent from the original Vedanta ; t at 
 least, it is not to be met with in the purely Vedantic 
 Upanishadfc, occurring for the first time in the $vetasvatara 
 Upanishad. Again in the later Vedanta works Avidya 
 and Maya are used synonymously, or, if distinguished from 
 one another, they are supposed to arise respectively from 
 the more or less pure character of their substance 1 . The 
 omniscient, but personal Isvara is there explained as a 
 reflection of Maya, but as having subdued her, while the 
 individual soul, Pr%/7a or (?iva, is represented as having 
 been subdued by Avidya, and to be multiform, owing to 
 the variety of Avidya. The individual soul, being endowed 
 with a causal or subtle body, believes that body to be its 
 own, and hence error and suffering in all their variety. 
 As to the development of the world, we are toM that it was 
 by the command of tsvara that Prak?^ti, when dominated 
 by darkness, produced the elements of ether, air, fire, water 
 and earth, all meant to be enjoyed, that is, to be experienced 
 by the individual souls. 
 
 In all this we c<;n hardly be mistakeh if we recognise 
 the influence of S&mkhya ideas, obscuring and vitiating 
 the monism of the Vedanta, pure and simple. In that 
 philosophy there is no room for a Second, or for a Prakriti, 
 nor for the three Gurtas, nor for anything real by the side 
 of Brahumn. 
 
 Hrw that influence wa exercised we cannot discover, 
 and it is possible that in ujicient times already there existed 
 this iuiluenee of one philosophical system upon the other, 
 for we set; ev^n in some of the Upaniehads a certain 
 
 1 I translate Suttva hero by substnce>f** the context hardly allows 
 that wo should take it for the Guna of goodness 
 
LATER VEDANTA MIXED WITH SAlfXHYA. 21 7 
 
 mixture of what we should afterwards have to call the 
 distinctive teaching* of Vedanta, Samkhya, or Yoga- philo- 
 sophy. We must remember that in India the idea of 
 private property in any philosophic truth did hardly exist. 
 The individual, as we saw before, was of little consequence, 
 and could never exercise the same influence which such 
 thinkers as Socrates or Plato exercised in Greece. If the 
 descriptions of Indian life emanating from the Indians 
 themselves, and from other nations they came in contact 
 with, whether Greek conquerors or Chinese pilgrims, can 
 be trusted, we may well understand that truth, or what 
 was taken to be truth, was treated not as private, but as 
 common property. It' there was an exchange of ideas 
 among the Indian seekers after truth, it was far more in 
 the nature of co-operation towards a common end, than in 
 the assertion of any claims of originality or priority by 
 individual teachers. That one man should write and 
 publish his philosophical views in a book, and that another 
 should read and criticise that book or carry on the work 
 where 1 it had been left, was never thought of in India in 
 ancient times. If A. referred to B. often, as they say, from 
 mere civility, Pujartham, B. would refer to A., but no one 
 would ever say, as so often happens with us, that he had 
 anticipated the discovery of another, or that some one else 
 had stolen his ideas. Truth was not an article that, accord- 
 ing to Hindu ideas, could ever be stolen. All that could 
 happen and did happen was that certain opinions which 
 had been discussed, sifted, and generally received in one 
 Asrama, hermitage, Arama, garden, or Parishad, religious 
 settlement, would in time be collected by its members and 
 reduced to a more or less systematic form. What that 
 form was in early times we may see from the Brahrnafias, 
 and more particularly from the Upanishuds, i.e. Seances, 
 gatherings of pupils round their teachers, or later on from 
 the Sutras. It cannot be doubted that these Sutras pre- 
 suppose, by their systematic form, a long continued in- 
 tellectual labour; nay it seems to me difficult to account 
 for their peculiar literary form except on the ground that 
 they were meant to be learnt by heart and to be accom- 
 panied from the very beginning by 9 running commentary. 
 
2l8 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 without which they would have been perfectly unintel- 
 ligible. I suggested once before that this very peculiar 
 style of the Sutras would receive the best historical expla- 
 nation, if it could be proved that they represent the tirst 
 attempts at writing for literary purposes in India. What- 
 ever the exact date may be of the introduction of a &inis- 
 trorsum and dextroraum alphabet for epigraphie purposes 
 in India (and in .spite of all efforts not a single inscription 
 has as yet been discovered that can be referred with cer- 
 tainty to the period before Asoka, third century B.C.), every 
 classical scholar knows that there always is a long interval 
 between an epigraphic and a literary employment of the 
 alphabet. People forget that a period marked by 'written 
 literary compositions requires a public, and a large public, 
 which is able to read, for where there is no demand there 
 is no supply. IS 1 or must we forget that the old .system of 
 a mnemonic literature, the Paramparii, was invested with 
 a. kind of sacred character, and would not have been easily 
 surrendered. The old mnemonic system was upheld by 
 a strict discipline which formed the principal part of the 
 established system of education in India, as has been fully 
 described in the PrMieakhyas. They explain to us by 
 what process, whatever existed at thai time of literature, 
 cliieiiy sacred, was firmly imprinted on the mewicry of the 
 young. These young pupils were in fact the books, the 
 scribes were the Gurus, the tablet Was the brain* We can 
 hardly imagine such a state of literature, and the transition 
 from it to a written literature must have marked a new 
 start in the intellectual life of the people at large, or at 
 least of the educated classes. Anybody who has come in 
 contact with the Pandits of India has been able to observe 
 the wonderful feats that can be achieved by that mnemonic 
 discipline even at present, though it is dying out before 
 our wyptf al the approach of printed books, nay of printed 
 editions of their own sacred texts. I need hardly say that 
 even if Biihler's idea of the introduction of a Semitic 
 alphabet into India by neans of commercial travellers 
 about 800 or 1000 B.C. wore more than a hypothesis, it 
 would not prove the existence of a written literature at 
 that time. The adaptation of a Semitic alphabet to the 
 
RELATIVE AGE OF PHILOSOPHIES AND SUTliAS. 2 19 
 
 phonetic system as elaborated in the Prati*akhyas may 
 date from the third, possibly from the fourth century u.c., 
 but the use of that alphabet for inscriptions begins in the 
 middle of the third century only; and though we cannot 
 deny the possibility of its having been ustd for literary 
 purposes at the same time, such possibilities would form 
 very dangerous landmarks in the chronology of Indian 
 literature. 
 
 But whatever the origin of the peculiar Sutra-literature 
 may have been and I give my hypothesis as a hypothesis 
 only all scholars will probably agree that these Sutras 
 could not be the work oi : one individual philosopher, but 
 that we have in them the last outcome of previous centuries 
 of thought, and the final result of the labours of numerous 
 thinkers whose name** are forgotten and will never be, 
 recovered. 
 
 Relative Age of Philosophies and 
 
 If we keep this in mind, we shall ECO that the question 
 whetlier any of the texts of the six philosophies which we 
 now possess should be considered as older than any other, 
 is really a question impossible to answer. The tests for 
 settling the relative ages of literary works, applicable 
 to European literature, are not applicable to Indian 
 literature. Thus, if one Greek author quotes another, 
 we feel justified in taking the one who is quoted as the 
 predecessor or contemporary of the one who quoees. But 
 because (rainuni quotes BMarayana and Btularayawa 
 traimini, and because their systems show an acquaintance 
 with the other five systems of philosophy, we have no 
 right to arrange them in chronological succession. Karmda, 
 who is acquainted with Kapihi, is clearly criticised by 
 Kapila, at least in our Kupi la-Sutras. Kapiki, to whom 
 the Sitmkhya-Sutras are ascribed, actaally adopts one of 
 Badavay aria's Sutras, IV, s, i, and inserts it tut Idem verb is 
 in his own work, IV, 3. He does the same for the Yoga- 
 Sutras I, 5 and II, 46, which occur in II, 33, III, 34, and 
 VI, 24 in the Samkhya-Sutrus which wo possess, . Kanada 
 was clearly acquainted with Goiama, while Gotama attacks 
 in turn certain doctrines of KapJ;= : Badar&yami. It 
 
22O INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 has been supposed, because Pata7 t gali ignores all other 
 systems, that therefore he was anterior to all of them l . 
 But all such conclusions, which would be perfectly legiti- 
 mate in Greek and Latin literature, have no weight what- 
 ever in the literary history of India, because during its 
 mnemonic period anything could be added and anything 
 left out, before each system reached the form in which we 
 possess it. 
 
 Age of Kapila- Sutras. 
 
 The Sutras of Kapila, which have come down to us, are 
 so little the work of the founder of that system, that it 
 would be far safer to treat them as the last arrangement 
 of doctrines accumulated in one philosophical school during 
 centuries of Parampara or tradition. It is easy to see that 
 the, Yoga-philosophy presupposes a Samkhya-philosophy, 
 but while Pata;7</ali, the reputed author of Yoga-Sutras 
 has been referred to the second century B.C., it is now 
 generally admitted that our Samkhya-Sutras cannot be 
 earlier than the fourteenth century A.D. It is necessary 
 to distinguish carefully between the six philosophies as so 
 many channels of thought, and the Sutras which embody 
 their teachings and have been handed down to us as the 
 earliest documents within our reach. Yoga, as a technical 
 term, occurs earlier than the name of any other system of 
 philosophy. It occurs in the Taittiriya and Ka^a Upani- 
 shads, and ia mentioned in as early an authority as the 
 Asvalayana-GHhya-Sutras. In the Maitray. Up. VI, 10 we 
 meet even with Yogins. But it by no means follows that 
 the Yoga, known in those early times, was the same as 
 what we possess in Pata;//ali's Sutras of the Yoga-philo- 
 sophy. We look in vain in the so-called classical Upanishads 
 for the names of either Sfimkhya or Vedanta, but Samkhya, 
 occurs in the compound Samkhya-Yoga in the /Svetfu>vatara 
 Up. VI, 13 and in several of the minor Upanidiads. It 
 should be observed that Vedanta also occurs for the first 
 time in the Maine SVet&tfVatara VI, 22, and afterwards in 
 the smaller Upanishads. All such indications may become 
 valuable hereafter for chronological purposes. In the 
 
 1 Rajondralal Mitra, I.e., p. xviii. 
 
AGE OF KAPILA-SUTRAS. 221 
 
 Bhagavad-gita II, 39 we meet with the Samkhya as the 
 name of a system of philosophy and likewise as a name of 
 its adherents, V, 5. 
 
 As to our Samkhya-Sutras their antiquity was first 
 shaken by Dr. FitzEdward Hall. Va/caspati Misra, the 
 author of the Samkhya-tattva-Kaumudi, who, according 
 to Professor Garbe, can be safely referred to about 1 150 A. D., 
 quotes not a single Sutra from our Samkhya-Sutras, but 
 appeals to older authorities only, such as Pa>~fca.sikha, Var- 
 shaganya, and the Rar/avartika. Even Madhava about 
 13^0 A.D., who evidently knew the Sutras of the other 
 systems, never quotes from our Samkhya-Sutras ; and why 
 not, if they had been in existence in his time ? 
 
 But we must not go too far. It by no means follows 
 that every one of the Sutras which we possess in the body 
 of the Samkhya-Sutras, and the composition of which is 
 assigned by Balasastrin to so late a period as the sixteenth 
 century, is of that modern date. He declares that they 
 were all composed by the well-known Vigwana-Bhikshu 
 who, a*s was then the fashion, wrote also a commentary on 
 them. It is quite possible that our Sa?/ikhya-Sutras may 
 only be what we should call the latest recension of the 
 old Sutras. We know that in India the oral tradition of 
 certain texts, as, for instance, the Sfttras of Pa/mni, was 
 interrupted for a time and then restored again, whether 
 from scattered MSS., or from the recollection of less forget- 
 ful or forgotten individuals. If that was the case, as we 
 know, with so voluminous a work as the MahabMshya; 
 why should not certain portions of the Samkhya-Sutras 
 have been preserved here and there, and have been added 
 to or remodelled from time to time, till they me"et us at 
 last in their final form, at so late a date as the fourteenth 
 or even the sixteenth century ? It was no doubt a great 
 shock to those who stood up for the great antiquity of 
 Indian philosophy, to have to confess that a work for 
 which a most remote date had always been claimed, may not 
 be older than the time of Des Cartes, at least in that final 
 literary form in which it has reached us. But if we con- 
 sider the circumstances of the case, it is more than possible 
 that our Sfttras of the Samkhya-philosophy contain some 
 
222 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 of the most ancient as well as the most modern Sfttras, 
 the utterances of Kapila, Asuri, Pav/raakha and Varslia- 
 gawya, as well as those of Isvara-Krishna and even of 
 Vi<///ana-Bhi kshu. 
 
 SAmkhya-kArik&s. 
 
 But if WQ must accept so very modern a date for our. 
 Kapila-Sutras, we are fortunate in being able to assign 
 a much earlier and much more settled date to another 
 work which for centuries seems to have formed the recog- 
 nised authority for the followers of the Samkhya in India, 
 the so-called Samkhya-karikas or the sixty-nine or seventy 
 Versus memoriales of ts vara- Krishna (with three supple- 
 mentary ones, equally ascribed to that author). That these 
 Karikas are older than our Sutras could easily be proved 
 by passages occurring among the Sutras, which are almost 
 literally taken from the Karikas 1 , 
 
 Alberuni, who wrote his account of India in the first 
 half of the eleventh century, was well acquainted not only 
 with Is vara-Kr /shea's work, but likewise, as has been 
 shown, with Gaudlapada's commentary on it*. Nay, we 
 can even make another step backward. For the Samkhya- 
 karikas exist in a Chinese translation also, made by 
 /fari-ti (lit. true truth),- possibly Paramartha, a Tripifaka 
 law-teacher of the Kit an dynasty, A.D. ^57 to 589 (not 
 583). Paramartha carne to China in about 547 A.D. in the 
 reign of the Emperor Wu-ti of the LiaH dynasty which 
 ruled in Southern China from 502 to 557 A.D. 3 , and was 
 followed by the Khun dynasty. He lived till 582 A. p.; 
 and there are no less than twenty-eight of his translations 
 now in existence, that of the Suvar/m-Saptati-sastra being 
 the twenty-seventh (No. 1,300 in B. Nanjio's Catalogue). 
 The name given to it in Chinese, 'the Golden Seventy 
 Discourse/ is supposed to fefer to the number of verses in 
 the Karika. K&n-ti was not considered a good Chinese 
 scholar, and his translation of the Abhidhaiina-Kosha- 
 sastra, for instance, had in consequence to be replaced by 
 a new translation by flioucn-thsang. 
 
 1 Sco Hall, Sawzkhya-Sfira, p. ra ; Dcuson, VodAntn, p. 361. 
 
 * Garl>o, Siimkhya uinl Yoga, p. 7. 
 
 3 SH' Mayor's Chinese Reader's Manual, which gives the ex.ict dates. 
 
DATS OF GATLDAPADA, 223 
 
 But though we are thus enabled to assign the Samkhya- 
 karika to the sixth century A.D., it by no means follows 
 that this work itself did not exist before that time. Na- 
 tive tradition, we are told, assigns his work to the first 
 century B.C. 
 
 Pate of 
 
 But even here new difficulties arise with regard to the 
 age of GawZapada, the author of the commentary on the 
 Karikas. This commentary also, so we were informed by 
 Beal, had been translated into Chinese before 582 A. D. ; 
 but how is that possible without upsetting the little we 
 know of GaucZapada's date, tfamkara is represented as 
 the pupil of Govihda who was the pupil of Gaurfapada. 
 But jS'awkara's literary career began, as is generally 
 supposed, about 788 A.B. How then could he have been 
 the literary grandson of Ganrfapada, and son or pupil of 
 Goviuda ? As Mr. Beal could no longer be consulted 
 I asked one of my Chinese pupils, .the late Mr. Kasa- 
 wara,*to translate portions of the Chinese commentary for 
 me ; but the specimens he sent me did not suffice to settle 
 the question whether it was really a translation of Gaurfa- 
 pada's commentary. It is but right to state here that 
 Telang in the Indian Antiquary, XIII, 95, places Sawkara 
 much earlier, in 590 A.D., and that Fleet, in the Indian 
 Antiquary, Jan., .1887, assigns 630 to 65.5 as the latest date 
 to King Yrishadeva of Nepal who is said to have received 
 Samkara at his court, and actually to have given the name 
 of $a?;ikaradeva to his son in honour of the philosopher. 
 In order to escape from ail these uncertainties I wrote once 
 more to Japan to another pupil of mine, Dr. Takakusu, and 
 he, after carefully collating the Chinese translation with the 
 Sanskrit commentary of Gaurfapada, informed me that the 
 Chinese translation of the commentary was not, and could 
 not in any sense be called, a translation of Gaua'apada's com- 
 mentary. So much trouble may be caused by one unguarded 
 expression I Anyhow this difficulty is now removed, and 
 /Samkara's date need not be disturbed. The author of the 
 Kfcrikas informs us at the end of his work that this philo- 
 sophy, proclaimed by the greatest sage, i. e. Kapila, had 
 
224 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 been communicated by him to Asuri, by Asuri to Paw&a- 
 sikha, and, as the Tattva-samasa adds, from Pa/7&asikha to 
 Pata/?</ali l , and had been widely taught until, by an unin- 
 terrupted series of teachers, it reached even tsvara- Krishna, 2 . 
 He calls it the Shashtfi-tantra, the Sixty-doctrine. A simi- 
 lar account is given by Paramartha in his comment on the 
 first verse, c Kipila (Kapila),' he says, ' was a JS/shi descended 
 from the sky and was endowed with the four virtues, 
 dutifulness (Dharma), wisdom (Pra<y/~a), separation from 
 desires (Vairagya), and freedom (Mpksha). He saw a 
 Brahman of the name of O-shu-li (Asuri) who had been 
 worshipping heaven or ^ the Devas for a thousand years, 
 and said to him : " O Asuri, art thou satisfied with the 
 state of a Grihastha or householder ? " After a thousand 
 years he came again, and Asuri admitted that he was 
 satisfied with the state of a Grihastha. He then came a 
 third time to Asuri, whereupon Asuri quitted the state of 
 a householder and became a pupil of Kapila/ These may 
 be mere additions made by Paramartha, A but they show, at 
 all events, that to him also Kapila and Asuri were persons 
 of a distant past. 
 
 Tattva-samasa. 
 
 But however far the Karikas of Isvara-Krishna may go 
 back, they are what they are, a metrical work in the style 
 of a later age, an age that gave rise to other Karikas like 
 Bhartrihari's (about 650 A.D.) Karikas on grammar. 
 Everybody has wondered, therefore, what could have be- 
 come of the real Sarakhya-Sutras, if they ever existed ; or, 
 if they did not, why there should never have been such 
 Sutras for so important a system of philosophy as the 
 Samkhya. There is clearly a great gap between the end 
 of the Upanishad period and the literary period that was 
 able to give rise to the metrical work of Isvara -Krishna. 
 In what form could the Samkhya : philosophy have existed 
 in that interval 
 
 To judge from analogy we should certainly say, in the 
 
 1 This would scorn to place the Tnttva-samnsa later than Pataw^nli. 
 
 2 See Karika, w. 70, 71. 
 
TATTVA-SAMASA. 225 
 
 form of Sfttras, such as were handed down for other 
 branches of learning by oral tradition. The Karikas them- 
 selves presuppose such a tradition quite as much as the 
 much later Sutras which we possess. They are both meat' 
 to recapitulate what existed, never to originate what we 
 should call new and original thoughts. When we see the 
 K&rikas declare that they leave out on purpose the Akha- 
 yikas, the illustrative stories contained in the fourth book 
 of our Sfttras, this cannot prove their posteriority to the 
 Sutras as we have them ; but it shows that at tsvara- 
 Krishn&'s time there existed a body of S&mkhya-philosophy 
 which contained such stories a$ we find in our modern 
 Sfttras, but neither in tfye Karikas nor in the Tattva- 
 samasa. Besides these stories other things also were omitted 
 by Isvara- Krishna, comprehended under the name of Para- 
 vada, probably controversies, such as those on the necessity 
 of an Isvara. 
 
 Under these circumstances I venture to say that such 
 a work in Sfttras not only existed, but that we are in 
 actual possession of it, namely in the text of the much 
 neglected Tattva-sam&sa. Because it contains a number 
 of new technical terms, it has been put down at once as 
 modern, as if what is new to us must be new chronolo- 
 gically also. We know far* too little of the history of the 
 Samkhya to justify so confident a conclusion. Colebrooke l 
 told us long ago that, if the scholiast of Kapila 2 may be 
 trusted, and why should he not ? the Tattva-samasa was 
 the proper text-book of the Samkhya-philosophy. It was 
 a* mere accident that he, Colebrooke, could not find a copy 
 of it. ' Whether that Tattva-sarnasa of Kapila be extant/ 
 he wrote, ' or whether the Sfttras of Pau&agikha be so, is 
 not certain/ And again he wrote : ' It appears from the 
 Preface of the Kapila-bh&shya that a more compendious 
 tract in the form of Sfttras or aphorisms, bears the title 
 of Tattva-samasa, and is ascribed to the same author, i. e. to 
 Kapila. 
 
 I admit that the introductory portion of this tract sounds 
 modern, and probably is so, but I find no other marks of 
 
 1 Essays, I, p. 244. 
 
 1 Samkhya -prava/rana-bhashya, pp. 7, no. 
 
 15 Q 
 
226 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 a modern date in the body of the work. On the contrary 
 there are several indications in it of its being an earlier 
 form of the Samkhya-philosophy than what we possess in 
 the Karikas or in the Sfttras. When it agrees with the 
 Karikas, sometimes almost verbatim, it is the metrical 
 text that seems to me to presuppose the prose, not the 
 prose the metrical version. In the Sutras themselves we 
 find no allusion as yet to the atheistic or non-theistic doc- 
 trines which distinguish the later texts of the Samkhya, 
 and which are still absent from the Samkhya-karikas also. 
 The so-called Aisvaryas or superhuman powers, which are 
 recognised in the Tattva-samasa, might seem to presuppose 
 the recognition of an Isvara, though this is very doubtful ; 
 but the direct identification of Purusha with Brahman in 
 the Tattva-sarnasa points certainly to an earlier and less 
 pronounced Nirisvara or Lord-less character of the ancient 
 Samkhya. It should also be mentioned that Vi(//?ana- 
 Bhikshu, no mean authority on such matters, and even 
 supposed by some tb have been himself the author of our 
 modern Samkhya-Sutras, takes it for granted that the 
 Tattva-samasa was certainly prior to the Kapila-Sutras 
 which we possess. For why should he defend Kapila, and 
 not the author of the Tattva-samasa, against the charge of 
 Punarukti or giving us a mere useless repetition, and why 
 should he have found no excuse for the existence of the 
 Kapila-Sutras except that they are short and complete, 
 while the Tattva-samasa is short and compact l ? 
 
 Not being able to find a MS. of the Tattva-samasa Cole- 
 brooke decided to translate instead the Samkhya-karikas, 
 and thus it came to pass that most scholars have been 
 under the impression that in India also this metrical ver- 
 sion was considered as the most authoritative and most 
 popular manual oi: the Samkhya-philosophy. This is the 
 way in which certain prepossessions arise. We have learnt 
 since from Ballantyne - that at Benares, where he resided, 
 these Karikas were hardly known at all except to those 
 who had seen Professor Wilson's English edition of them, 
 
 1 Sawkhya-pravatoma-bhashya, Introduction. 
 
 2 Drift of the Samkhya, p. i. 
 
TATTVA-SAMASA. 2 27 
 
 while the Tattva-samasa was well known to all the native 
 assistants whom he employed. Nor can we doubt that in 
 the part of India best known to Ballantyne it was really 
 an important and popular work, if we consider the number 
 of commentaries written on it *, and the frequency of 'allu- 
 sions to it which occur in other commentaries. The com- 
 mentary published by Baltantyne is, if I understand him 
 rightly, anonymous. It gives first what it calls the Sam- 
 khya-Sutra/tti, and then the Samasakhya-siitra-vrzttiA. 
 Hall, 1. c., p. 13, quotes one commentary by Kshemananda, 
 called Samkhya-kramadipika, but it is not quite clear to 
 me whether this is the same as the one published by 
 Ballantyne, nor have I had access to any other MSS. 
 
 We must not forget that in modern times the Samkhya- 
 philosophy has ceased to be popular in several parts of 
 India. Even in the sixteenth century VigrMna-Bhikshu, 
 in his commentary on the Samkhya-SMras (v. 5), complains 
 that it has been swallowed up by the sun of the time, and 
 that but a small part of the moon of knowledge remained ; 
 while in the Bhagavata Purarta I, 3, io,-tlie S&mkhya is 
 spoken of as K&la-vipluta, destroyed by ime. Professor 
 Wilson told me that, during the whole of his intercourse 
 with learned natives, he met with one Br&hman only who 
 professed to be acquainted with the writings of this philo- 
 sophical school, and Professor Bhandarkar (1. c., p. 3) states 
 that the very name of Samkhya-prava&ana was unknown 
 on his side of India. Hence we may well understand that 
 S&mkhya MSS. are scarce in India, and entirely absent in 
 certain localities. It is possible also that the very small- 
 ness of the Tattva-samasa may have lowered it in the eyes 
 of native scholars, and that in time it may have been 
 eclipsed by its more voluminous commentaries. But if we 
 accept it as what it professes to be, and what, up to the 
 time of Vi(/fllna-Bhikshu at least, it was considered to be 
 in India, it seems to me just the book that was wanted to 
 fill the gap to which I referred before. By itself it would 
 fill a few pages only. In fact it is a mere enumeration of 
 topics, and, as such, it would agree very well with the 
 
 1 Five are mentioned by Hall in his Preface, p. 33. 
 
 Q 2 
 
22% INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 somewhat puzzling name of Smkhya, which means no 
 more than enumeration. All other derivations of this title 
 seem far-fetched 1 as compared with this. According to 
 Vigw&na-Bhikshu in his commentary on the Sfttras (pp. 6< 
 TIO, ed. Hall), both the S^mkhya-Sfttras and the Yoga- 
 Sfttras are really mere developments of the Tattva-sam&sa- 
 Sutras. Both are called therefore Sarakhya-prava&ana, 
 exposition of the Samkhya, the latter adding the peculiar 
 arguments in support of the existence of an Isvara or 
 Supreme Lord, and therefore called Sesvara, in opposition 
 to the SHrakhya, which is called An-tsvara, or Lord-less. 
 
 And here it is important to remark also that the name 
 of Shashti-tantra, the Doctrine of the Sixty, which is given 
 by tsvara-Krislwa, or at all events by the author of the 
 72nd of his Kriks, should occur and be accounted for in 
 the Tattva-samasa, as containing the 17 (enumerated in 64 
 and 65), and the 33, previously exhibited in 62 and 63, 
 together with the 10 Mulikarthas or fundamental facts 
 which together would make up the sixty topics of the 
 Shashti-tantra. At the end of the 25 great topics of the 
 Tattva-sam&sa we find the straightforward declaration : 
 ' Iti tattva-sam&sllkhya-samkhya-sutr^Tii/ Here end the 
 Smkhya-Sfttras called Tattva-sam&sa. 
 
 At first sight, no doubt, Sam&sa seems to mean a mere 
 abstract; but Sam&sa may be used also in opposition to 
 Brihat, and there is no other work in existence of which 
 it could be called an abstract, certainly not either of the 
 Karikas or of the modern Sfttras, such as we possess them. 
 The whole arrangement is different from the other and 
 more recent treatments of Samkhya-philosophy. The three 
 kinds of pain, for instance, which generally form the 
 starting-point of the whole system, are relegated to the 
 very end as a separate topic. We meet with technical 
 subjects and technical terms which are not to be found at 
 all in other and, as it would seem, more modern S&rakhya 
 works. The smallness of the Tattva-samasa can hardly be 
 used as an argument against its ever having been an 
 
 1 They are mentioned in the Preface to Hall's edition of the Sawikhya- 
 prava&ana-bhftshya, 1856. Some of them are mere definitions without 
 any attempt at etymology. 
 
ANTERIORITY OF VEDANTA OR SAJfKHYA. 22Q 
 
 important work, for we find similar short, yet old Sutra- 
 works, for instance, the Sarvanukrama and other Anukra- 
 rnanis described in my History of Ancient Sanskrit Litera- 
 ture 1 . However, in matters of this kind we must avoid 
 being too positive either in denying or asserting tfye age 
 and authenticity of Sanskrit texts. All I can say is that 
 there is ho mark of modern age in their language, though 
 the commentary is, no doubt, of a later date. What weighs 
 with me is the fact that Indian Pandits* evidently con- 
 sidered the Tattva-sainasa-Sfttras as the original outlines 
 of the Samkhya-philosophy, while the idea that they are 
 a later spurious production rests, as far as I can see at 
 present, on no real argument whatever. 
 
 Anteriority of VedAnta or S&mkhya. 
 
 It must be clear from all, this how useless it would be, 
 with the limited means at our disposal, to attempt to prove 
 the anteriority either of the Vedanta or of the Samkhya, 
 as systems of philosophy, and as distinguished from the 
 Sutras in which we possess them. External or historical 
 evidence we have none, and internal evidence, though it 
 may support a suggestion, can but seldom amount to 
 positive proof. We can understand how, out of the seeds 
 scattered about in the Upanishads, there could arise in 
 time the S3 T stematic arrangement and final representation 
 of systems such as have been handed down to us in the 
 Sutras or the Vedanta, the Samkhya, and the other schools. 
 It cannot be denied that in the Upanishad period Vedantic 
 ideas are certainly more prevalent than those of the 
 Sar/ikhya. I go even a step further and admit that the 
 Samkhya-philosophy may have been a kind of toning 
 down of the extreme Monism of the Advaita Vedanta. 
 I think we can enter into the misgivings and fears of 
 those who felt startled by the unflinching Monism of the 
 Vedanta, at least as interpreted by the school which was 
 represented rather than founded by $amkara. Now, the 
 two points which are most likely to have caused difficulty 
 
 1 These Anukramas have 'jfeen very carefully published in the Anecdota 
 Oxonierisia by Professor Macdonell, to whom I had handed over my 
 materials 
 
23O INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 or given offence to ordinary consciences, would seem to have 
 been the total denial of what is meant by the reality of 
 the objective world, and the required surrender of all 
 individuality on the part of the subject, that is, of our- 
 selves. These are the points which seem most startling 
 even to ourselves, and it is quite possible that they may 
 have given rise to another system free from these startling 
 doctrines, such as we find in the Samkhya. They certainly 
 formed the chief stumbling-block to Eamanu^a and those 
 who had come before him, such as Bodhayana and other 
 Purva/caryas, and led them to propound their own more 
 human interpretation of the V e danta, though sacrificing 
 the Isvara in order to save the reality of each Purusha. 
 
 These conflicting views of the world, of the soul, and of 
 God, emerge already in the Upanishads ; and in a few of 
 them, the Svetasvatara, Maitray., and KaAa Upanishads, 
 for instance, there are utterances that come very near to 
 what we know as Samkhya rather than Vedaiita doctrines. 
 Vedanta ideas preponderate, however, so decidedly in the 
 Upanishad literature, that we can well understand that in 
 the oral tradition of the schools the Samkhya doctrines 
 should have exercised a limited influence only, whatever 
 favour they may have found with those who were repelled 
 by the extreme views of the monistic Vedanta. The fol- 
 lowers of Kapila had an advantage over the Vedantists in 
 admitting a Prakriti, or a something objective, independent 
 of Brahman or Purusha, though called into life and activity 
 by the look of Purusha only, and disappearing when that 
 look ceased. They were also less opposed to the common 
 consciousness of mankind in admitting the reality of indi- 
 vidual souls. Dualism is always more popular than rigorous 
 Monism, and the Samkhya was clearly dualistic when it 
 postulated nature, not only as the result of Avidya or 
 Maya, but as something real in the ordinary sense of that 
 word, and when it allowed to the individual souls or (rivas 
 also an independent character. It should be remembered 
 that the denial of an Isvara or personal Lord did not 
 probably form part of the original Samkhya, as presented 
 to us in the Tattva-samasa. It would seem therefore that 
 on these very important points the Samkhya was more 
 
ATHEISM AND ORTHODOXY. 23! 
 
 conciliatory and less defiant to the common sense of man- 
 kind than the Vedanta, and though this is far from proving 
 that it was therefore posterior to the Vedanta in its severest 
 form, it might well be accepted as an indication that these 
 two streams of thought followed parallel courses, starting 
 from a common fund of ancient Vedic thoughts, but diverg- 
 ing afterwards, the Vedanta unflinchingly following its 
 straight course, the other, the Samkhya, avoiding certain 
 whirlpools of thought which seemed dangerous to the 
 ordinary swimmer. To the people at large it would natur- 
 ally seem as if the Vedanta taught the oneness of all indi- 
 vidual souls or subjects in Brahman, and the illusory 
 character of all that is objective, while the Samkhya 
 allowed at all events the temporary reality of the objec- 
 tive world and the multiplicity of individual souls. Of 
 course, we must leave it an open question for the present 
 whether the extreme monistic view of the Veda was due to 
 $amkara, or whether, like Ramanu^a, he also could claim 
 the authority of Purva/caryas in his interpretation of Bada- 
 rayav<a's Sutras. If that were so, the difference between 
 the two systems would certainly seem to be irreconcilable, 
 while minor differences between them would in India at 
 least admit of a friendly adjustment. 
 
 Atheism and Orthodoxy. 
 
 Even on what seems to us so vital a point in every 
 philosophy as theism or atheism, Indian philosophers seem 
 to have been able to come to an understanding and a com- 
 promise. We must remember that in the eyes of the 
 Brahmans the Samkhya is atheistic and yet orthodox. 
 This seems to us impossible ; but the fact is that orthodoxy 
 has a very different meaning in India from what it has 
 with us. What we mean by orthodoxy was with them 
 not much more than a recognition of the supreme authority 
 of the Veda. The Samkhya, whatever we may think of 
 its Vedic character, never denies the authority of the Veda 
 in so many words, though it may express a less decided 
 submission to it. Whether in its origin the Samkhya was 
 quite independent of the. "Veda, is difficult to say. Some 
 scholars think that the recognition of the supreme authority 
 
232 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 of the $ruti was an afterthought with Kapila, a mere stroke 
 of theological diplomacy. But if so, we should be forced 
 to admit that the Samkhya philosophers wished, by means 
 of this diplomacy, to be raised to the same position which 
 others, such as the Vedantists, had occupied before them ; 
 and so far it might seem to indicate the posteriority of the 
 Samkhya, as a system of philosophy. 
 
 It is important here to remember that the Samkhya not 
 only declared for the authority of the Veda, but had never 
 openly rejected it, like B?*ihaspati or Buddha. It is quite 
 another question whether it really carried out the spirit of 
 the Veda, particularly of the Upanishads. That $amkara, 
 the great defender of Vedantism, should deny the correct- 
 ness of the interpretation of the Veda, adopted by Kapila, 
 proves after all no more than that a difference of opinion 
 existed between the two, but it would show at the same 
 time that Kapila, as well as $amkara, had tried to repre- 
 sent his philosophy as supported by passages from the 
 Veda. To judge from a passage in the beginning of the 
 Samkhya-karikas it might seem indeed that Kapila placed 
 his own philosophy above the Veda. But he really says 
 no more there than that certain remedies for the removal 
 of pain, enjoined by the Veda, are good, and that other 
 remedies enjoined by philosophy are likewise good ; but 
 that of the two the latter are better, that is, more efficacious 
 (Tattva Kaumudi, v. 2). This does not affect the authority 
 of the Veda as a whole, as compared with philosophy or 
 human knowledge. We must not forget that after all it is 
 $ruti or revelation itself which declares that all remedies 
 are palliative only, and that real freedom (Moksha) from 
 all suffering can be derived from philosophical knowledge 
 only, and that this is incomparably higher than sacrifices or 
 other meritorious acts (Samkhya-prava&ana I, 5). 
 
 Authority of the Veda. 
 
 What authority Kapila assigns to the Veda may be 
 gathered from what he says about the three possible 
 sources of knowledge, perception, inference, and Apta- 
 vafcana, that is the received, correct, or tr-ue word, or, it 
 may be, the word of a trustworthy person. He explains 
 
SAJHKHYA HOSTILE TO PRIESTHOOD. 233 
 
 Aptavafcana in v. 5 by Aptasruti, which clearly means 
 received revelation or revelation from a trustworthy source. 
 However the commentators may differ, /Sruti can here mean 
 the Veda only, though, no doubt, the Veda as interpreted 
 by Kapila. And that the Veda is not only considered as 
 equal to sensuous perception and inference, but is placed by 
 him on an even higher pedestal, is shown by the fact that 
 Ka.pila (Sutras V, 51) declares it to be self-evident, SvataA- 
 pramaTiam, while perception and inference are not, but are 
 admitted to be liable to error and to require confirmation. 
 
 Though it is true, therefore, that with the true Samkhya 
 philosopher the Veda does not possess that superhuman 
 authority which is ascribed to it by Badarayana, I cannot 
 bring myself -to believe that this concession on the part of 
 Kapila was a mere artifice to escape the fate which, for 
 instance, befell Buddha. There are many passages where 
 Kapila appeals quite naturally to $ruti or revelation In 
 I, 36 he appeals to both /Sruti and Nyaya, reason)}^, out in 
 many places he appeals to /Sfruti alone. That rwjlation is 
 to be looked upon as superior to experience or sensuous 
 perception is stated by him in so many words in I, 147, 
 where we read 'There is no denial of what is established 
 by $ruti.' Again, when the Nyaya philosophy tries to 
 establish by reasoning that the organs of sense are formed 
 of the elements, Kapila squashes the whole argument by 
 a simple appeal to $ruti. ' They cannot be so formed/ he 
 says, ' because /Sruti says that they are formed of Aham- 
 kara, self-consciousness (II, 20) V 
 
 Other passages where the authority of Sruti is invoked 
 as paramount by Kapila, or supposed to be so by the com- 
 mentator, may be found in Samkhya-Sutras I, 36 ; 77 ; 83 ; 
 147; 154; II, ao; 23; III, 15; 80; IV, 22; &c. 
 
 S&mkhya hostile to Priesthood. 
 
 There is one passage only in which a decidedly hostile 
 feeling towards the Brahmanic priesthood may be dis- 
 covered in Kapila's Sutras, and it seems full of meaning. 
 Among the different kinds of bondage to which men are 
 
 1 But are not the elements mere Vikaras of Ahawkara? 
 
234 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 liable, but ought not to be, is one called Dakshma-bandha, 
 bondage arising from having to offer gifts to priests, which 
 seems to be condemned as superstitious and mischievous l . 
 
 As springing from the great mass of philosophic thought 
 accumulated in the Upanishads, the Samkhya, like the 
 Vedanta-philosophy, was probably at first considered as 
 neither orthodox nor unorthodox. It was simply one out 
 of many attempts to solve the riddle of the world, and even 
 the fact that it did not appeal to a personal Lord or creator, 
 was evidently at first not considered sufficient to anathe- 
 matise it as unorthodox or un-Vedic. It was probably at 
 a much later time when the Vedanta and other systems had 
 already entrenched themselves behind revelation, or the 
 Veda, .as the highest authority even on philosophical 
 questions, that other systems, having been proved un- 
 Vedic, came to be considered as objectionable or unor- 
 thodox, while the Vedanta, as its very name implied, was 
 safe u?K*if, r the shadow of the Veda. I know that other 
 scholars maintain that with the Samkhya any appeal to the 
 Veda was an afterthought only, and not an essential part 
 of the original system, nay, not even quite honest. We 
 may admit that the Samkhya has no need of the Veda, but 
 why should it appeal to it even on indifferent questions, if 
 the Veda had not been considered by it as of supreme 
 authority. It is possible that there may have been origin- 
 ally a^ difference between $ruti, revelation as not human, 
 and Aptava&ana, authoritative tradition as human, and 
 that with Kapila the Veda was treated at first as coming 
 under Aptava&ana. But however this may be, unless our 
 conception of the development of Indian philosophy, as we 
 catch glimpses of it now and then in the course of centuries, 
 is entirely wrong, it must be clear that, in the present state 
 of our knowledge, to call one channel of philosophic thought, 
 whether S&mkhya or Vedanta, in the form in which it has 
 reached us, more ancient than the other, would be mere 
 playing with words. 
 
 1 800 Tuttva-samasft aa ; S&iwkhya-karikuB 44. 
 
PARALLEL DEVELOPMENT OP PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEMS. 235 
 Parallel development of Philosophical Systems. 
 
 The result of this desire to fix dates, where dates are 
 impossible, has often proved most mischievous. Scholars 
 of recognised authority have arrived at and given expression 
 to convictions, not only widely different, but diametrically 
 opposed to each other. The chief cause of this confusion 
 has been that, by a very natural tendency, we always wish 
 to arrange things Nacheinander or in causal connection, 
 instead of being satisfied with taking things as Nebenein- 
 ander, parallel and formed under similar conditions, spring- 
 ing from a common source arid flowing on side by side in 
 the same direction. 
 
 A reference to the history of language may make my 
 meaning clear<3to No one would say that Greek was older 
 than Latin. Ureek h^ts some forms more primitive than 
 Latin, but Latin also has^ some forms more primitive than 
 Greek. It is true that we know literary productions in 
 Greek at a much earlier time than literary productions 
 in Latin, nor would >any Sanskrit scholar deny that the 
 Sutras of BadarayaTia are older than the Samkhya-Sutra^s, 
 as we now possess the two. But for all that, Greek, as 
 a language, cannot be a day older than Latin. Both 
 branched off, slowly it may be and almost imperceptibly 
 at firso, from the time when the Aryan separation took 
 place. In their embryonic form they both go back to some 
 indefinite date, far beyond the limits of any chronology. 
 In India we may learn how, like language, religion, and 
 rnytliOAOgy, philosophy also formed at first a kind of 
 common property. We meet with philosophical ideas of 
 a Vedantic character, though as yet in a very undecided 
 form, as far back as the hymns of the Kig-veda ; ihey meet 
 us again in the Brahmawas and in some of the Upanishads, 
 while the Samkhya ideas stand out less prominently, owing, 
 it would seem, to the ascendency gained at that early period 
 already by the Vedanta. Instead of supposing, however, 
 that passages in support of Samkhya ideas occurring in 
 certain of the older Upanishads were foisted in at a later 
 time, it seems far more probable to me that they were 
 survivals of an earlier period of as yet undifferentiated 
 philosophical thought. 
 
236 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Buddhism subsequent to Upanishads. 
 
 What remains of the chronological framework of Indian 
 philosophy is in the end not much more than that both 
 Vedanta and Samkhya ideas existed before the rise of 
 historical Buddhism. The very name of Upanishad, for 
 instance, as so peculiar that its occurrence in ancient Bud- 
 dhist texts proves once for all the existence of some of these 
 works before the rise of Buddhism. 
 
 The recognition of mendicant friars also, as a social insti- 
 tution, seems to me simply taken over from the Brahmans. 
 The very name of Bhikkhu, applied to the members of the 
 Buddhist fraternity, comes from the same source. It is 
 true, no doubt, that the name of Bhikshu does not occur in 
 the classical Upanishads, but the right of begging, whether 
 in the first or the third of the Asramas (Brahmafcarin or 
 Vanaprastha), is fully recognised, only that the third and 
 fourth Asramas are not so clearly distinguished in early 
 times as they are in Manu and afterwards. In the Kaush. 
 Up. II, 2 we read of a man who has begged through a vil- 
 lage and got nothing (Bhikshitva) ; in the Kh&ud. tip. IV, 
 3, 5, a Brahmafcarin is mentioned who has begged. The 
 technical term for this begging is Bhiksh&fcarya in the 
 Brih. Ar. Up. Ill (V), 5, i, and exactly the same compound, 
 BhikkhaMrya, occurs in the Dhammapada 392 ; BhaiksM- 
 Mrya occurs also in the MuTidaka I, z, u, so that the fact 
 that the substantive Bhikshu does not occur in the classical 
 Upanishads can hardly be used as an argument to prove 
 that the status of the mendicant friar was not known 
 before the spreading of Buddhism. It is true that in its 
 social meaning Asrama, the name of the three or four stages, 
 does not occur in the classical Upanishads ; but, as we find 
 Asramin in the Maitray. Up. IV, 3, we can hardly doubt 
 that the. three or four stages (Brahma&ari, Gaha^Ao, Vana- 
 "p&tflio, Bhikkhu) were known before the rise of Buddhism, 
 and taken over by the Buddhists from the Vedic Brahmans. 
 Socially, the only Asramas that remained among the Bud- 
 dhists were two, that of the Gn'hins and that of the 
 Bhikkhus. 
 
 That many of the technical terms of the Buddhists 
 (Uposhadha, &c.) could have come from the same source 
 
ASVAGHOSHAS BUDDHA-A'AEITA. 237 
 
 only, has long been known, so much so that it has been 
 rightly said, Without Br&hmanism no Buddhism. 
 
 The institution of the Vasso *, for instance, the retreat 
 during the rainy season, is clearly taken over from the 
 Varshas, the rainy season, as kept by the Br&hmans, and 
 so is the quinquennial celebration of the Pa/J/cavarsha-pari- 
 shad, and many other customs adopted by the Buddhists. 
 
 Lalita-vlstara. 
 
 I have explained before why at present I attribute less 
 importance than I did formerly to the occurrence of a 
 number of titles, including S&mkhya, Yoga, Vaiseshika, 
 and possibly Nyaya, in the Lalita-vistara. If the date 
 assigned by Stanislas Julien and others to certain Chinese 
 translations of this work could be re-established, the passage 
 so often quoted from the twelfth chapter would be of con- 
 siderable value to us in forming an idea of Indian literature 
 as it existed at the time when the Lalita-vistara was orig- 
 inally composed. We find here the names not only of the 
 Vedic glossary (NighaTitfu ?) the Nigamas (part of Nirukta), 
 Puratias, Itihasas, Vedas, grammar, Nirukta, /SiksM, jfiTAan- 
 das, ritual (Kalpa), astronomy (6?yotisha), but, what would 
 be most important for us, the names of three systems of 
 philosophy also, Samkhya, Yoga, and Vaiseshika, while 
 Hetuvidyzt can hardly be meant for anything but; Ny&ya. 
 But until the dates of the various Chinese translations of 
 the Life of Buddha have been re-examined, we must abstain 
 from using them for assigning any dates to their Sanskrit 
 originals. 
 
 Asvag hosha' a Buddha-arita. 
 
 We may perhaps place more reliance on Asvaghosha's 
 Buddha-fcarita, which, with gre&t probability, has been 
 ascribed to the first century A. D. He mentions Vyasa, the 
 son of Sarasvati, as the compiler of the Veda, though not 
 of the Vedanta^Sfttras ; he knows Valmiki, the author of 
 the Ram&yaTia, Atreya as a teacher of medicine, and Ganaka, 
 the well-known king, as a teacher of Yoga. By far the 
 most important passage in it for our present purpose is the 
 conversation between Arada and the future Buddha, here 
 
 1 S.B.E., vol. viii, p. 213. 
 
338 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 already called Bodhisattva in the twelfth book. This 
 Arada'is clearly a teacher of Samkhya-philosophy, it may 
 be of Samkhya in an earlier state ; and, though the name 
 of Samkhya does not occur, the name of' .Kapila does (XII, 
 31), and even a disciple of his is mentioned. Here then we 
 have in a poem, ascribed to the first century A. D., a clear 
 reference to that philosophical system whiah is known to 
 us under the name of S&mkhya, and we have actually the 
 name of Kapila, the reputed author of that system.- The 
 name of Kapila- vastu l also occurs, as the birthplace of 
 Buddha and as the dwelling of the famous sage Kapila. 
 No reference to the Vedaiita has been met with in Asva- 
 ghosha's Buddha-Aiarita, though the substitution of the 
 Vedantic name of Brahman for the S&mkhya name of 
 Purusha deserves attention. 
 
 Buddhist Suttas. 
 
 If we consult the Buddhist Suttas, which, whatever the 
 date of their original composition rnay have been, were at 
 all events reduced to writing in the first century B.C., and 
 may be safely used therefore as historical evidence for that 
 time, we find there also views ascribed to the Brahmans 
 of Buddha's time which clearly breathe the spirit of the 
 Samkhya-philosophy. But it would be very unsafe to say 
 more, and to maintain that such passages prove in any way 
 the existence of fully developed systems of philosophy, or 
 of anything very different from what we find already in 
 certain Upanishads. All we* can say is that there are 
 a number of terms in the Suttas which are the very terms 
 used in the Vedanta, S&mkhya and Yoga-philosophies, such 
 as Atman, /S&svata, Nitya (? Anitya), Akshobhya, Brahman, 
 t^vara, Dhanna, PariTtftma, and many more ; but, so far as 
 I know, there is not one of which we could say that it 
 could have been taken from the Sutras only, and from 
 nowhere else. 
 
 We should remember that in the Buddhist Canon we find 
 constant mention of Titthiyas or Tirthakas and their here- 
 
 1 I write V&stu, because that alone means dwelling-place, while Vastu 
 moans thing. Vastu became Vatthu in Pali, and was then probably 
 retranslated into Sanskrit as Vastu. 
 
AVALAYANA S G/?/HYA-SUTKAS. 239 
 
 il systems of philosophy. Six contemporaries of Buddha 
 mentioned, one of them, NigaTitAo Nataputta, being the 
 
 tical 
 are 
 
 well-known founder of (rainism, Parana Kassapa, Makkhali, 
 Agita, Pakudha and Sar7^aya l . Nor are the names of the 
 reputed authors of the six systems of Brahmanic-philosophy 
 absent from the Tripifaka. But we hear nothing of any 
 literary compositions ascribed to Badarayana, Craimini, 
 Kapila, Pata/?#ali, Gotama or Ka^ada. Some of these 
 names occur in the Buddhist Sanskrit texts also, such as 
 the Lankavatara where the names of KaTiada, Kapila, 
 Akshapada, Brihaspati are met with, but again not a single 
 specimen or extract from their compositions. 
 
 Asvalayana's Grthya-Sfttras. 
 
 Another help for determining the existence of ancient 
 Sutras and Bhashyas may be found in the Grihya-Sutras 
 of Asvalayana and $amkhayana, works belonging to the 
 age of Vedic literature, though it may be to the very end 
 of what I call the Sutra-period. Here, as I pointed out in 
 1859 in my History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature, we find 
 not only the Rig-veda with all its subdivisions, but such 
 names as Sumantu, (raimini, Vaisampayana, Paila, Sutras, 
 Bhashyas, Bharata 2 , Mahabharata, teachers of the law, 
 (rananti, Bahavi, Gargya, Gautama, A^akalya, Babhravya, 
 MartcZavya, MaraZiikeya, Gargi Vafcaknavi, Vadava Prati- 
 theyi, Sulabha Maitreyi, Kahola Kaushitaka, Mahakaushi- 
 taka, Paimgya, Mahapaimgya, Suy&gns, >Samkhayana, 
 Aitareya, Mahaitareya, the Sakala (text), the Bashkala 
 (text), Su^atavaktra, Audavahi, Mahaudavahi, Sau(/ami, 
 6'aunaka, Asvalayana. The /Samkhayana Grihya-Sutras 
 IV, 10, give the same list, though leaving out a few names 
 and adding others. The most valuable part in both sets 
 of Grihya-Sutras is their testifying at that early and 
 probably pre-Buddhistic time, not only to the existence of 
 Sutras, but of Bhashyas or commentaries also, without 
 which, as I said before, neither the philosophical, nor the 
 
 1 SamatfHa-Phala-Sutta 3. 
 
 2 How careful we must be, we may learn from the fact that instead of 
 Bharata and Mahabharata, other MSS. read Bharatadharma/caryas ; while 
 in the Samkhayana Gnhya-Sutras IV, 10, 4, Bharata, MahAbharata and 
 Dharmafcaryas are loft out altogether. 
 
240 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 grammatical, nor any other Sfttras would ever have been 
 intelligible, or even possible. 
 
 Did Buddha borrow from Kapila? 
 
 I may seem very sceptical in all this, but I cannot even 
 now bring myself to believe that the author of Buddhism' 
 borrowed from the Samkhya or any other definite system 
 of philosophy, as known to us in its final Sutra form, in 
 the sense which we ourselves assign to borrowing. Buddha, 
 it seems to mfe, had as much right to many of the so-called 
 Sa7ftkhya or Vedanta ideas as Kapila or anybody else. 
 Who would say, for instance, that his belief in Samsara 
 or migration of souls was borrowed from Badaraya??a or 
 Kapila ? It belonged to everybody in lrd ja as much as 
 a belief in Karman or the continuous working of deeds. 
 In the great dearth of historical dates it may no doubt be 
 excusable, if we lay hold of anything to save us from 
 drowning while exploring the chronology of Indian litera- 
 ture. Our difficulties are very great, for even When the 
 names of the principal systems of philosophy and the 
 names of their reputed authors are mentioned, how do we 
 know that they refer to anything written that we possess ? 
 Unless we meet with verbatim quotations, we can never 
 know whether a certain book of a certain author is in- 
 tended, or simply the general Parampara, that is, the tradi- 
 tion, as handed down in various Asramas, two things Which 
 should be carefully distinguished. 
 
 It is strange to see how often our hopes have been roused 
 and disappointed. We were told that in Professor Hardy's 
 most valuable edition l of the Anguttara a number of 
 philosophical sects, were mentioned which existed at the 
 time of Buddha's appearance, such as (i) Agrlvakas, (2) 
 NigaTitf/tas, (3) Mundasavakas, (4) 6?ailakas, (5) Paribba- 
 gfakas, (6) MagaraKkas, (7) Teda?ic?ikas, (8) Aviruddhakas, 
 (9) Gotamakas, and (10) Devadhammikas. But not one of 
 these names helps us to a real chronological date. Agivakas 
 and NigaTi^Aas are the names of ffaina ascetics, the latter 
 belonging to the Digambara sects, which could hardly have 
 been established long before Buddha's appearance, while 
 
 1 The Pali Text Society, vol. iii, p. 276. 
 
BANAS HAUSHAATAKITA. 241 
 
 MuTicJaaavakas, i.e. pupils of the shaveling, the Buddha, 
 and Gotamakas would seem to be schools which owed their 
 existence to Buddha himself. The other names 
 ascetics, Paribb%aKas, religious mendicants, 
 i.e, Samnyasins carrying the three staves, would be appli- 
 cable both to Brahmanic and Buddhist sects. Magamftkas. 
 if meant for Magadhikas, people of Hagadha, would be 
 Buddhists again. Aviruddhakas, a name not clear to me, 
 may have been intended for ascetics no longer impeded by 
 any desires, while Devadbamrnikas are clearly worshippers 
 of the ancient national Devas, and therefore Br&hinanic, 
 and possibly Vedic. We get no historical dates from the 
 names of any of these schools, if schools they were. All 
 tj^ey teach is that at tLe time Brahmanic and Buddhist 
 sects were existing side by side in large numbers, but by 
 no means, as is commonly supposed, in constant conflict 
 with each other l . * Of the six recognised systems of philo- 
 sophy, of their eponymous heroes or their written works, 
 we do not hear a single word. 
 
 Bana's Harshaarlta. 
 
 Not even in later works, which have been referred to the 
 sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries A.D., do we meet with 
 actual quotations from our S&tras of the six Dar*anas. 
 Bana, in his Life of King Harsha, knows indeed of Aupam- 
 shadas, Kapilas, K&nadas; and if the Kapilas are the 
 followers of the Sa/mkhya, Kanadas the followers of the 
 V^aiseshika school, the Aupanishadas can hardly be meant 
 for anybody but the Vedimtins. Varaha-Mihira also, in 
 the sixth century A.D.. mentions Kapila and Kanabhufl 
 (Vaiseshika), but even this does not help us to the dates of 
 any Sfttras composed by them. 
 
 The Chinese translator of the K&rikas, likewise in the 
 sixth century, informs us that these Karikas contain the 
 words of Kapi)a or of Pa/7fcasikha, the pupil of Asuri, who 
 was the pupil of Kapila. We are told even tha,t there were 
 originally 60,000 Gathas, and all that lavara- Krishna did 
 
 1 Cf. Rhys Davids, J. R A. S., J.m., 1898, p. 197. 
 16 * 
 
INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 was to select seventy of them for his seventy or seventy- 
 two KPirikas. 
 
 That Madhava (7350 A.D.), while mentioning the Sutras 
 of the other systems, should not have mentioned those of 
 the Samkhya, is no doubt, as I pointed out before, a strong 
 argument in support of their non-existence in his time. 
 But it is no proof, as little as we may conclude from the 
 fact that Eiouen-thsang translated the Vaiseshika-nik&ya- 
 dasapadartha-sastra by (r/tanafcmdra, and riot the Vaise- 
 shika-Sutras by Ka^ada, that therefore these Sutras did not 
 exist in his time. We cannot be too careful in such matters, 
 for the unreserved acceptance of a purely conjectural date 
 is very apt to interfere with the discovery of a real date. 
 Hiouen-thsang likewise mentions a number of Nyaya works, 
 but not Gotama's Nyaya-Sfttras, Does that prove that 
 Gctt&ma's Sutras were unknown in the seventh century ? 
 It< ..may or may not. Pie relates that Guwamati defeated 
 a famous Samkhya philosopher of the name of Madhava, 
 but again lie tells us 110 more. His own special study, as 
 is well known, was the Yoga-philosophy. And here again, 
 though h& speaks of a number of Yoga works, he says not 
 a word of the most important of them all, the Siltras of 
 Pata%ali l . Yet I doubt whether we may conclude from 
 this that these Sutras did not exist at his time. 
 
 The 
 
 If then I venture to call the Tattva-samasa the oldest 
 record that has reached us of the Samkhya-philosophy, 
 and if I prefer to follow them in the account I give of that 
 philosophy, I am quite aware that many scholars will object, 
 and will prefer the description of the Samkhya as given in 
 the KarJkas and in the Sutras. Both of them, particularly 
 the Karikas, give us certainly better arranged accounts of 
 that philosophy, as may be seen in the excellent editions 
 and translations which we owe to Professor Garbe, and 
 1 may now odd to Satish Chandra Banerji, 1898. If, as 
 J believe, the Tattva-samasa-Sutras are older than our 
 Sti9/<kliya- Sutras, their account of the Samkhyu-philosophy 
 
 1 M. M., India, p, 362. 
 
THE TATTVA-SAMASA. 243 
 
 would always possess its peculiar interest from a historical 
 point of view; while even if their priority with regard to 
 the Karikas and Sutras be doubted, they would always 
 retain their value as showing us in how great a variety 
 the systems of philosophy really existed in so large a country 
 as India. 
 
 These Samasa- Sutras, it is true/ are hardly more thari 
 a table of contents, a mere Samkhyam or Pari-samkhya, 
 but that would only show once more that they presuppose 
 the existence of a commentary from the very first. What 
 .we possess in the shape of commentaries may not be very 
 old, for commentaries may come and -go in different schools,* 
 while the Sutras which they intend to explain, would re- 
 main unchanged, engraved on the memory of teachers and 
 pupils. How tenacious that philosophical Parampara was 
 we can see from the pregnant fact that the Akhy&yikas or 
 stories, though left out in the Karikas, must surely have 
 existed both before and after the time of Isvara-Kraima, 
 for though absent in the Tattva-samasa and in the Karikas, 
 they reappear in our Samkhya-Sxttras. Where were they 
 during the interval if nob in Sutras or Karikas, now lost 
 to us? 
 
 The commentary on the Tattva-samasa, the publication 
 of which we owe to Ballantyne, begins with an introduction 
 which sounds, no doubt, like a late tradition, but reminds 
 us in some respects of the dialogue at the beginning of the 
 Chinese translation of the commentary on the Samkhya- 
 k&rikas. But though it may sound like a late tradition, 
 it would be very difficult to prove that it was so. Chron- 
 ology is not a matter of taste that can be settled by mere 
 impressions. 
 
 A certain Brahman, we are told, overcome by the three 
 kinds of pain, took refuge with the groat it*shi Kapila, the 
 teacher (not necessarily the originator) of the Samkhya 1 , 
 and having declared his family, his name, and his clan in 
 order to become his pupil, he said : * Reverend Sir. What is 
 here on earth the highest (the vwmmum bonum)t What 
 is truth ? What must I do to be saved '? ' 
 
 1 In the BhAgavata-purana I, 3, n. Kapila is said to havo rented the 
 Sawkhya (Sawkliya-Sara, eel. Hall, p. 7, note). 
 
 K 2 
 
244 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Kapila said, ' I shall tell thee.' Then follow the topics 
 which are twenty-five in number : 
 
 List of Twenty-five Tattva*. 
 
 I. The eight Prakritis (primary and productive,, 
 elements), 
 
 i. The Prakriti as Avyakta (the non-differenllated 
 or undeveloped principle) ; 
 
 3. The Buddhi (intellect), of eight kinds ; 
 
 CH 
 
 r? 
 
 3. The Ahamkara (the subject), of three kinds 
 
 (Vaikarika, Tai^asa, Bhfttadi) ; 
 4-8. The five Tanmatras (essences) of sound, touch, 
 
 colour, savour, and odour. 
 
 II. The sixteen Vikaras (modifications), 
 
 9-13. The five Buddhindriyas (perceptive organs) ; 
 
 14-18. The five Karmendriyas (active organs); 
 I 1 9. Manas (central organ or mind) ; 
 ( 30-24. The Mahabhfttas (material elements) ; 
 
 III. 35. The Purusha (Spirit or Self). 
 
 IV. The Traigunya (triad of forces). 
 
 V. The Sahara (evolution). 
 
 VI. The Pratisa/Jcara (dissolution). 
 
 VII. The Adhyatrna ( referring to the thirteen instru- 
 
 VIII. The Adhibhuta \ ments, i. e. to Buddhi, Ahemkara, 
 
 IX. The Adhidaivata ( Manas, and the ten Indriyas. 
 
 X. The five Abhibuddhis (apprehensions), five acts of 
 Buddhi or the Indriyas. 
 
 XI. The five Karmayonis (sources of activity). 
 
 XII. The five Vayus, winds or vital spirits. 
 
 XIII. The five Karmatmans, kinds of Ahawkara. 
 
 XIV. Avidya (Nescience), fivefold, with sixty-two sub- 
 divisions. 
 
 XV. Asakti (weakness), twenty-eightfold (nine Atushfts 
 and eight Asiddhis). 
 
 XVI. Tiishti (contentment), ninefold. 
 
 XVII. Siddhi (perfection), eightfold. 
 
 XVIII. Mulikarthas (cardinal facts), eight. 
 
 XIX. Anugrahasarga (benevolent creation). 
 
THE AVYAKTA. 245 
 
 XX. Bhutasarga (creation of material elements), fourteen, 
 
 XXI. Bandha (bondage), threefold. 
 
 XXII. Moksha (freedom), threefold. 
 
 XXIII. Pramam (authorities), threefold. 
 
 XXIV. DuAkha (pain), threefold. 
 
 I have given these titles or headings in Sanskrit, and 
 shall often have to *^se these Sanskrit terms, because their 
 English equivalents, even when they can be found, are too 
 often unintelligible or misleading without a commentary, 
 This commentary which follows immediately on the Sutra, 
 is meant to elucidate their meaning, and it does so on the 
 whole satisfactorily, but the English word seerns never to 
 square the Sanskrit terms quite accurately. 
 
 The commentator begins by asking, * Now what are the 
 eight Prakritis ? ' and he answers, again in technical terms 
 which will have to be explained: I. ' i. The Avyakta 
 (chaos), 3 Buddhi (light or perception), 3. Ahamk&ra 
 (subjectivity), and 4-8, the five Tanmatras (transcendental 
 elements).' 
 
 The Avyakta. 
 
 He then continues: i. * Here then the Avyakta, neuter 
 (the undeveloped), is explained. As in the world various 
 objects such as water-jars, cloth, vases, beds, c., are mani- 
 fest, not so is the Avyakta manifest. It is not apprehended 
 by the senses, such as ths ear, &c. And why '} Because it 
 has neither beginning, middle, nor end, nor has it any parts, 
 It is inaudible, intangible, invisible, indestructible, eternal, 
 without savour and odour. The learned declare it to be 
 without beginning and middle, to be beyond what is great 1 , 
 unchanging, pre-eminent. And again, this Avyakta is 
 subtle, without attributes, without beginning or end, pro- 
 ducing (Prasuta), but alone of all the eight "Prakritis un- 
 pioduced (Aprasuta), without parts), one only, but con) men 
 to all. And these are its synonyms, that is to say, words 
 applicable to the Avyakta, under certain circumstances . 
 
 l Mahat in the sense of mind, and Pradhana in the sense of nature, 
 hardly to be appropriaie here. 
 
246 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Pradhana (principal), Brahman *, Pura (abode), Dhruva 
 (unchanging), Pradhanaka (chief), Akshara (indestructible), 
 Kshetra (field, object), Tamas (darkness), Prasuta (produc- 
 tive)/ 
 
 Buddhi. 
 
 2. ' And what is called Buddhi (intellect) ? Buddhi is 
 Adhyayasaya (ascertainment). It is that through which 
 there Is in regard to a cow, &c., the conviction (Pratipatti), 
 "This is so and so, not otherwise, this is a cow, not a horse ; 
 this is a post, not a man/'' Such is Buddhi, the most won- 
 derful phase of Prakr/ti/ 
 
 Buddhi is generally taken here in its subjective or psycho- 
 logical sense, but whatever native and European authorities 
 may have to say, it is impossible that this should have been 
 its original meaning in the mind of Kapila. If Buddhi 
 .meant only determination (Adhyavasaya), even in its widest 
 sense, it would clearly presuppose the later phases, not only 
 Ahamkara, Manas, Indriyas, as subjective, but likewise 
 something that is knowable and determinable, such as 
 Mahabhutas, or at least Tanmatras. Though this psycho- 
 logical acceptation is the common acceptation of Buddhi 
 among native writers on Samkhya, yet sense is more 
 important than commentaries, The Buddhi or the Mahat 
 must here be a phase in the cosmic growth of the universe, 
 like Prakrit! in the beginning, and the senses and the 
 other organs of the soul ; and however violent our pro- 
 ceeding may seem, we can -hardly help taking this Great 
 Principle, the Mahat, in a cosmic sense. Now the first 
 step after Avyakta, the undeveloped, dull, and as yet 
 secseless Prakriti, can only be Prakriti as lighted up, as 
 rendered capable of perception, and no longer as dull 
 matter. If taken in a psychological sense, it supplies, no 
 doubt, in a later stage, the possibility of individual per- 
 ception also, or of the determination of this and that. But 
 
 1 Brahman Beema out of place here, and to bo synonymous with 
 Punii^u or Auri:in rather than with the Avyaktu. It is given as 
 a yno.\y:riyof Furusha further on, but strictly speaking Prakrit! als^ 
 '.void! I, t'romjl Vcdantic point of view, fall to Brahman as being what if, 
 called the srifcStaiiti.il cause of the world, lut of an immaterial world, a& 
 it w 
 
BT7DDHI. 247 
 
 originally it must have been meant as Prakriti illuminated 
 and intellectualised, and rendered capable of becoming at 
 a later time the germ of Ahawkara (distinction of subject 
 and object), Manas, mind, and Indriyas, apprehensive senses. 
 Only after Prakriti has become lighted up or perceptive, 
 only after mere material contact has become consciousness, 
 can we imagine the distinction, whether general or indi- 
 vidual, between subject and object (Ahamkara), and their 
 new relation as perceiver and perceived, as ' I ' on one side 
 and * this ' arid ' that J on the other. 
 
 This may seem a very bold interpretation, and a complete 
 forsaking of native guidance, but unless a more reasonable 
 and intelligible account can be given of Buddhi, there seems 
 no escape from ii 
 
 What native interpreters have made of Buddhi may 
 be seer in all their commentaries, for instance, Y&aspati- 
 Misra's commentary on K&rika 23 : ' Every man uses firJt 
 his external senses, then he considers (with the Manas), 
 then he refers the various objects to his Ego (Ahamk&ra), 
 and lastly he decides with his Buddhi what to do.' This 
 may be quite right in a later phase of the development of 
 Prakriti, it cannot possibly be right as representing the 
 first evolution of Prak?^ti from its chaotic state towards 
 light and the possibility of perception. It could not be the 
 antecedent of Ahawikara, Manas, arid even the Tanm&tras, 
 if it were no more than the act of fixing this or that in 
 thought. I am glad to find that Mr. S. C. Banerji on p. 146 
 of hj3 work arrives at much the same conclusion. 
 
 There are eight manifestations of this Buddhi (intellect), 
 (j) Dharma, virtue, (2) (?;?ana, knowledge, (3) Vairagya, 
 dispassionateness, (4) Aisvarya, superhuman power. 
 
 As each of these requires explanation, he explains them by 
 a very favourite process, namely, by contrasting them with 
 their opposites, and saying that (i) Dharma, virtue, is the 
 opposite of Aclharma, vice, and is enjoined by Smti and 
 Smriti, revelation and tradition. It is not opposed to, nay, 
 it ih in harmony with, the practice of the best people, and 
 has happiness for its outward mark. 
 
 (2) 6r/iana or knowledge, the opposite of A//#ana or 
 ignorance, is explained as the understanding of the twenty- 
 
248 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 five subjects (Tattvas), the states of thought (Bhava), and 
 the elements (Bhuta). 
 
 (3) Vairagya, dispassionateness, is the opposite of passion, 
 and consists in not being dependent on or influenced by 
 extern al objects, such as sound, &c. 
 
 (4) Aisvarya, superhuman power, is the opposite of 
 powerlessness, and consists of the eight qualities such as 
 Araman, extreme minuteness, i.e. being able to assume the 
 smallest form and weight, &c. l 
 
 These four* kinds of intellect (Buddhi) are classed as 
 Sattvika. 
 
 Their opposites are classed as Tamasa, dark or bad. 
 
 Through virtue, as a means, there takes place going up- 
 ward, through knowledge there arises liberation, through 
 dispassionateness men are absorbed in Prakrit! (Prakr?'ti- 
 laya ?), through superhuman power there comes unfettered 
 movement. 
 
 Thus has Buddhi in its. eight forms been described. 
 
 Synonyms of Buddhi are, Manas, mind, Mati, thought, 
 Mahat, the great, Brahma-, masc., Khyati, discrimination, 
 Pray/va, wisdom, $ruti, inspiration, DhViti, firmness, Pra- 
 (/>?anasantati, continuity of thought, Smriti, memory, and 
 Dhi, meditation. 
 
 It is quite clear that in all these explanations Buddhi is 
 taken as intellect, and as personal intellect, and that the 
 idea of a cosmic stage of intellectuality has been entirely 
 forgotten. Thus only can we account for the statement 
 that this Buddhi, if dominated by Sattva (Gu^a of purity), 
 is said to assume the form (Rupa) of virtue, knowledge, 
 dispassionateness, arid superhuman powers, while, if domi- 
 nated by Tamas (Guna of darkness), it takes the four 
 opposite forms of vice, &c. How could this be possible 
 beforfe the distinction between subject and object has been 
 realised by Ahamkara, and before Buddhi has assumed 
 
 1 These Alsvarytvs are believed in by Symkhya and Yoga, and are 
 acquired by Yogins by moans of long and painful practices. 
 
 a This also seems out of place here, unless the Sawkhyas give their 
 own meaning both to Brahman and Brahma. In later times Buddhi, 
 taken collectively, becomes the Upadhi or mental limitation of Brahma 
 or Hiranyagarbha. 
 
AHAJfKARA, 249 
 
 the character of sense-perception (Buddhindriyani) ? We 
 have, in fact, to read the Samkhya-philosophy in two 
 texts, one, as- it were, in the old uncial writing that shows 
 forth here and there, giving the cosmic process, the other 
 in the minuscule letters of a much later age, interpreted in 
 a psychological or epistemological sense. 
 
 Ahamkara. 
 
 3. Now, he asks, What is called Ahamkara? And he 
 answers, ' It is Abhimana, assumption or misconception, 
 and this consists in the belief that I am in the sound, 
 i. e. I hear, I feel, I see, I taste, and I smell, I am lord and 
 rich, I am Lsvara, I enjoy, I am devoted to virtue, by me a 
 man was slain, I shall be slain by powerful enemies, &c.' 
 
 $amkara in his commentary on the Vedanta-Sfttras gives, 
 though from a different point of view, some more instances, 
 as when a man, because his wife and children are unhappy, 
 imagines that he is unhappy, or that he is stout, thin, or 
 fair, that he stands, walks, or jumps, that he is dumb, 
 impotent, deaf, blind, that he has desires, doubts, or fears, 
 whereas all these things do not pertain to him at all, but 
 to Prakriti only. 
 
 ' Synonyms of Ahamk&ra, or rather modifications of it, 
 arer Vaikarika, modifying, Tairyasa, luminous, Bhtitadi, the 
 first of elements, Sanumana, dependent on inference, 
 Niranumana, not dependent on inference/ 
 
 Here we must distinguish again between Ahamkara, as 
 a cosmic power, and Ahamkara as a condition presupposed 
 in any mental act of an individual thinker. Ahamkara 
 was so familiar in the sense of Egoism that, like Buddhi, 
 it was taken in its ordinary rather than in its technical 
 Samkhya sense. I quite admit that this is a somewhat 
 bold proceeding, but how to get without it at a proper 
 understanding of the ancient Samkhya, the rival of the 
 Vedanta, I cannot see. We must remember that Ahamkara, 
 whatever it may mean in later times, is in the Samkhya 
 something developed out of primordial matter, after that 
 matter has passed through Buddhi. Buddhi cannot really 
 act without a distinction of the universe into subject and 
 object, without the introduction of the Ego or I, which 
 
25 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 again is impossible without a Non-Ego, or something 
 objective. After that only do we watch the development 
 of what is objective in general into what is objectively this 
 or that (the Tanmatras). But while the creation of what 
 is subjective and objective is the only possible meaning of 
 the cosmic Ahamkara, its psychological interpretation is 
 far more easy. Thus we are told that there are three or 
 four modifications of the Ahamkara, (i) the Vaikarika, 
 dominated by the Sattva-gu^a, helps to do good works; 
 (2) the Taigrasa, dominated by the Ra^asgiwa, helps to do 
 evil works ; (3) the Bhutadi, dominated by the Tamas-givna, 
 helps to do hidden works ; (4) the Sanumana Ahamkara Is 
 responsible for unintentional good; (5) the Niranumana, 
 for unintentional evil works. This (^vision, though rather 
 confused, shows at all events that the Ahamkara is here 
 treated as simply a moral agent, dominated by the Gwias, 
 but no longer as a cosmic potentia. These five modes of 
 Ahamkara are spoken of as Karma tma-ns also, i.e.* the very 
 essence of our acts, while in another place the Tattva- 
 samasa itself explains that Ahamkara should be taen as 
 an act of Buddhi directed towards the perception of the 
 nature of what is Self (subjective) or Not-Self (objective). 
 Though Ahamkara means only the production of Ego, yet 
 the production of Ego involves that of the Non-Ego, and 
 thus divides the whole world into what is subjective and 
 objective. 
 
 Five Tanm&tras. 
 
 4-8. If it is asked, What are the five Tanmatras (sub- 
 stances)'? he answers, The five substances or essences as 
 emanating from Aha?7*,k&ra, the essence of s- >und, contact, 
 colour, savour, and odour. 
 
 The essences of sound are perceived in sounds only. 
 Differences of sound, such as acute, grave, circumflexed, 
 and the notes of the gamut, such as Shacfy/a, C, .Rishabha, 
 D, Gandhara, E, Madhyama, F, Paft&ama, G, Dhaivata, A, 
 Nishada, B, are perceived ; but there is no difference in the 
 essence of sound. 
 
 The essences of touch are perceived in touch only. Dif- 
 ferences of touch, such as soft, hard, rough, slippery, cold, 
 
FIVE BUDDHINDRIYAS. 2$ I 
 
 and hot, are perceived, but there is no difference in the 
 essence- of touch. 
 
 The essences of colour are perceived in colour only. 
 Differences of colour, such as white, red, black, green, yel- 
 low, purple, are perceived, but there is no difference in the 
 essence of colour. 
 
 The essences of savour are perceived in savour only. 
 Differences of savour, such as pungent, bitter, astringentj 
 corrosive, sweet, acid, salt, are perceived, but there is no 
 difference in the essence of savour. 
 
 The essences of odour are perceived in odour only. 
 Differences of odour, such as sweet and offensive, are per- 
 ceived, but there is no difference in the essence of odour. 
 
 Thus have the essences been indicated ; and their syn- 
 onyms, though sometimes very inaccurate ones, are said to 
 be : Ayisesha, not differentiated, and therefore not percep- 
 tible, Mahabhutas ('?), the great elements ; Prakritis, natures, 
 Abhogya, not to be experienced, A??/u, atomic, Asanta, not- 
 pleasurable, Aghora, not-terrible, Amiictea, not-stupid ; the 
 last three being regations of the qualities of the Maha- 
 bhutas, according to the three Gunas preponderating in each. 
 And if it is asked why these eight Prakritis only, from 
 A vyakta to the Tanniatras, are called Prakritis, the answer 
 ib because they alone Prakurvanti, they alone bring forth, 
 or evolve. 
 
 Sixteen VikAras. 
 
 II. If it be asked ' Which are the sixteen Vikaras or 
 evolutions ? ' the answer is, ' the eleven sense organs (in- 
 cluding Manas), &nd the five elements.' 
 
 BuAdfc&ndriyas. 
 
 9-13. ' Now the organs are set forth; the ear, the skin, 
 the eyes, the tongue, and the nose, constitute the five 
 Buddhindriyab, or perceptive organs. 
 
 The ear perceives as its object sound, the skin touch, the 
 eye colour, the tongue savour, the nose odour/ 
 
 Being produced from the Tanmatras, the senses, as per- 
 ceiving, are represented as being of the same nature as the 
 objects perceived, a view of considerable antiquity. 
 
 
252 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Five Karmendriyas, 
 
 14-18. 'The five Karmendriyas or organs of action, 
 voice, hands, feet, the organ of excretion, and the organ of 
 generation, perform each its own work. The voice utters 
 words, the hands work, the feet perform movement, the 
 organ of excretion evacuation, the organ of generation 
 pleasure/ 
 
 Manas. 
 
 19. 'Manas, mind, both perceptive and active, performs 
 its acts of doubting and ascertaining/ 
 
 Central organ of the senses or KOLVOV alcrBriTijpLo^ might 
 be the nearest approach to the meaning of Manas ; but 
 mind may do, if we only remember its Samkhya definition, 
 as perceptive, like the other organs, and at tho same time 
 active like the Karmendriyas. 
 
 ' Thus have the eleven organs been explained. Their 
 synonyms are Karawa, instruments, Vaikarika, 'changing, 
 Niyata, special, Padani, appliances 1 , Avadhritani, kept 
 under (?), Anu, atomic, Aksha 2 , organ/ 
 
 Five Mafcabhutaa, 
 
 20-24. 'The Mahabhutas, or gross elements, are earth, 
 water, light, air, and ether/ 
 
 Here the earth, we are told, helps the other four, by 
 being their support. Water helps the other four by moist- 
 ening. Light helps the other four by ripening. Air helps 
 the other four by drying. Ether helps the other four by 
 giving space. 
 
 * Earth is possessed of five qualities, sound, touch, colour, 
 savour, and odour. Water is possessed of four qualities, 
 sound, touch, colour, and savour. Light is possessed of 
 three qualities, sound, touch, and colour. Air is possessed 
 of two qualities, sound and touch. Ether has one quality, 
 sound. Thus are the five Mahabhutas explained. 
 
 Their synonyms . are : Bhfttas, elements, A Bhuta-viseslias ; 
 special elements, Vikaras, modifications, Akritfc, species, 
 Tanu, skin (or body ?), Vigraha, shapes, /S'arita, pleasurable, 
 
 1 Garbe Sawkhya- Philosophic, p. 257. 
 3 Or Akshara, imperishable ? 
 
PUBUSHA. 253 
 
 Ghora, fearful, MM&a, stupid. Thus have the sixteen 
 Vikaras been described/ 
 
 Purasha. 
 
 III. 25. Now it is asked, 'What is the Purusha?' and 
 the answer is, * Purusha is without beginning, it is subtle, 
 omnipresent, perceptive, without qualities, eternal, seer, 
 experiencer, not an agent, knower of objects, spotless, not 
 producing. Why is it called Purusha ? Because of its 
 being old (Puranat), because it rests in the body (Puri 
 sayate), and because it serves as Purohita (Director)/ 
 These are, of course, fanciful etymologies; and we can 
 hardly doubt that we have, in the name of Purusha, a recol- 
 lection of the Vedic Purusha, one of the many names of the 
 supreme deity, by the side of Visvakarman, Hirariyagarbha, 
 Prair/apati, &c. Like Brahman when conceived as Atman, 
 Purusha also was probably used both for the divine and 
 for the human side of the same power. It is the multi- 
 plicity only of the Purusha which is peculiar to the Sam- 
 khya-philosophy. 
 
 1 And why is the Purusha without beginning 1 ? Because 
 there is no beginning, no middle, and no end of it/ This 
 is not a very satisfactory answer, but it is probably meant 
 for no more than that we never perceive a beginning, 
 middle, or end of it. Why is it subtle ? Because it is 
 without parts and supersensuous. Why omnipresent ? Be- 
 cause, like the sky, it reaches everything, and its extent is 
 endless. Why perceptive ? Because it perceives (that is, 
 for a time) pleasure, pain, and trouble. Why without 
 qualities ? Because the qualities of good, indifferent, and 
 bad are not found in it. Why eternal ? Because it wrs 
 not made, and cannot be made. Why seer ? Because 
 perceives the modifications of Prakriti. Why enjoy er ? 
 Because being perceptive it perceives (for awhile) pleasure 
 and pain. Why not an agent ? Because it is indifferent and 
 without the qualities (Gmias). W T hy tho Knower of body 
 or of objects ? Because it knows the qualities of objective 
 bodies. Why spotless ? Because neither good nor evil 
 acts belong to the Purusha. Why riot producing ? Be- 
 cause it has no seed, that is, it can produce no-thing. Thus 
 has the Purusha of .the Samkhya been described 
 
254 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 The synonyms of Purusha are, Atman, Self, Puman, male, 
 Puragu?ia#antugiva/i, a male living creature, Kshetra#wa, 
 knower of objects or of the body, Nara, man, Kavi, poet, 
 Brahman, Akshara, indestructible, Prawa, spirit, YaAka/t *, 
 anybody, Sat, He. 
 
 Thus h#ve the twenty-five substances been described, 
 viz. the eight Prakritis, the sixteen Vikaras, and the 
 Purusha. He who knows these twenty-five substances, 
 whatever stage of life he may be in, and whether he wear 
 matted hair, a topknot, or be shaven, he is liberated, there 
 is no doubt. This verse is often quoted by Samkhya philo- 
 sophers. Here, it seems, the first part of the Tattva-samasa 
 is ended, containing a list of the twenty-five Tattvas, in the 
 three divisions of Prakritis, Vikaras, and Purusha. 
 
 Purusha (subject). 
 
 I. Prakrit! (object). 
 Avyakta (chaos). 
 
 a. Mahat or Buddhi (light and intelligence as Samaahfi, not yet 
 
 | individualised). 
 
 3. Ahawkara (subjectivation). 
 
 5 Tanmatras (Sattvika) 10 Indriyas, organs (Ragasa) + i Manas (mind) 
 (subtle elements). (5 Buddhindriyas, 5 Karmendriyas, and Manas). 
 
 Tanmatras. Buddhindriyas. Karmendriyas. 
 
 1. Sound, 5abda. I. Srotra, hearing i. Speaking in tongue 
 
 in ear. 
 
 2. Touch, Sparra. 2. Tvafc, touch in 2. Grasping in hands. 
 
 skin. 
 
 3. Colour, Kupa. 3. ATakshus, seeing 3. Moving in fest 
 
 in eye. t 
 
 4. Savour, Rasa. 4. Cihva, tasting 4. Evacuating in Payu. 
 
 in tongue. 
 
 5. Odour, Gandha. 5. Ghrana, smell- 5. Generating in Upastha. 
 
 ing m nose. 
 
 5 Mahabhutas (Tamasa). 
 
 1. Aku-sa, ether (*abda). 
 
 2. VAyu, air (sabda *- sparsa). 
 
 3. Tejyas, fire (sabda + spai-sa + rftpa), 
 
 4. Ay>, water (sabda + sparsa + riipa f rasa), 
 
 5. J-Vtthivi, earth (sabda + sparsa + rupu. -r rasa -h gandha). 
 
 1 As ya/i, the relative pronoun could hardly be used as a name, 
 I supposed it might bo meant fcr th indefinite pronoun ya/ikaA, but this 
 is doubtful. 
 
THREE GUJVAS. 2.55 
 
 Is Pumaha an Agent? 
 
 Now follow a number of special questions, which seemed 
 to require fuller treatment. The first is, Is the Purusha an 
 agent, or is he not ? If Purusha were an agent, he would 
 do good actions only, and there would not be the three 
 different kinds of action. The three kinds of action are 
 (i) Good conduct, called virtue (Dharma), which consists in 
 kindness, control and restraint (of the organs), freedom 
 from hatred, reflection, displaying of supernatural powers. 
 
 (a) But passion, anger, greed, fault-finding, violence, 
 discontent, rudeness, shown by change of countenance, 
 these are called indifferent conduct. 
 
 (3) Madness^ intoxication, lassitude, nihilism, devotion to 
 women, drowsiness, sloth, worthlessneL-s, impurity, these 
 are called bad conduct. 
 
 We see here once more that the three Gmias must have 
 had originally a much wider meaning than is here described. 
 They are here taken as purely moral qualities, whereas 
 originally they must have had a much larger cosmic sense. 
 They we not qualities or mere attributes at all ; they are 
 on the contrary ingredients of Prakr/ti in its differentia- 
 tion of good, indifferent, bad ; bright, dim and dark ; light, 
 mobile, heavy. We see here the same narrowing of cos- 
 rnical ideas which we had to point out before in the case of 
 Buddhi and Ahamkara, and which, it seeing to me, would 
 render the original conception of the Samknya-philosophy 
 quite unmeaning. We must never forget that, even when 
 the Samkhya speaks of moral qualities, these qualities 
 belong to nature as seen by the Furusha, never to Purusha 
 apart from Prakrtti. 
 
 Three G>*u;as. 
 
 Whenever this triad is perceived in the world it is clear 
 that agency belongs to the GuTias, and it follows that 
 Purusha is not the agent. 
 
 Deceived by passion and darkness, and taking o wrong 
 view of these Gutias which belong to Prakr^ti, not to himself, 
 a fool imagine? that he himself is the agent, jbhough in 
 reality he is unable by himself to bend even a straw. Nay. 
 he becomes an agent, as it were, foolish and intoxicated by 
 
256 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 vain imagination and saying, 'All this was made by me 
 and belongs to me/ 
 
 And then it is said (in the Bhagavad-gita III, 27) : * Acts 
 are effected by the qualities (Gmtas) of Prakriti in every 
 way, but the Self ( Atman), deluded by the conceit of the I 
 (Ahamkara), imagines that the I is the agent/ 
 
 Ibid. XIII, 31 : 
 
 ' This imperishable supreme Self, from being without- 
 beginning and devoid of qualities, neither acts nor suffers, 
 even while staying in the body/ 
 
 And XIII, 29 : 
 
 ' He sees (aright) who looks upon actions as in all re- 
 spects performed by Prakriti alone, and upon the Self as 
 never an agent/ 
 
 Zs Pnmsha one or many? 
 
 Now comes the important question, Is that Purusha one 
 or many ? The answer to this question divides the Sara- 
 khya from the Vedanta-philosophy. The Samkhya answer 
 is that the Purusha is clearly many, because of the variety 
 in the acts of pleasure, pain, trouble, confusion and purify- 
 ing (of race), health, A birth and death : also on account of 
 the stages in life (Asrama) and the difference of caste 
 ( Var,ui). If there were but one Purusha, as the Vedantins 
 hold, then if one were happy, all would be happy ; if* one 
 Wi^re unhappy, all would be unhappy, and so on in the case 
 of people affected by trouble, confusion of race, purity of 
 race, health, birth and death., Hence there is not one 
 Purusha, but many, on account of the manifoldness >r ti- 
 eated by form, birth, abode, fortune, society or loneliness. 
 Thus Kapjfci, Awiia, Pa/f&asi'kha and Pata/7</ali, and all 
 other Skfftkf 3*^1 tteaeliers describe Purusha as many. 
 
 Vedanta Saying's. 
 
 But teachers who follow the Vedanta, such as Harihara. 
 Hini'tiya'garbha, Vyasa and others, describe Purusha as one. 
 And why so ? Because (as the Vedftnta says), 
 
 1 . Purusha is all this, what has been and what is to be, 
 ht- , lord of thut immortality which springs up by (sacri- 
 
VEDANTA SAYINGS. 257 
 
 fieial) food, that is, he is beyond the immortality of the 
 ordinary immortal gods l . 
 
 2. That is -4gm; that is Vayu, that is Surya, that is 
 jfandramas, that is pure, that is Brahman, that is water 
 and Praaapati 2 . 
 
 3. That is true, that is immortal, it is liberation, it is 
 the highest point, it is indestructible, it is the glory of the 
 sun: 
 
 4.' Higher than which there is nothing else, nothing 
 smaller, and nothing greater, the One stands like a tree 
 planted in the sky ; by him and by the Purusha, all this 
 is filled 3 . 
 
 5. Having hands and feet everywhere, having mouth, 
 head and eyes everywhere, hearing everywhere in this 
 world, it stands covering everything ; 
 
 6. Shining 4 through the qualities (Guwa) of all the 
 senses, and yet free from all the senses, the master of all, 
 the Lord, the great refuge of all ; 
 
 7. He is all substances everywhere, the Self of all, the 
 source of all ; that in which everything is absorbed, that 
 the sages know as Brahman, 
 
 8. For 5 there is but one Self of beings, settled in e very- 
 body , it is seen as one and as many, like the moon in the 
 water. 
 
 9. For he alone, the great Self, dwells in all beings, 
 whether moving or motionless, he by whom all this was 
 spread out. 
 
 i ex This Self of the world is one by whom was it made 
 ntanifold ? Some speak of the Self as several, because of 
 the existence of knowledge. &c. (because knowledge is 
 different in different people;. 
 
 ii. Wise 6 people see the same (Atman) in the Brahman, 
 
 1 These verses are meant to represent the views of the VedAnta, and 
 they are mostly taken from the Upanishads. The first from & vet. Up. 
 Ill, 15, occurs also Taitt. AT. Ill, 12, i, and in the Rig-veda X, 90, 2, 
 where we ehoxild read, Tit annenadhirohati, see Deussen, Geschichto, 
 I, p. 153. 
 
 3 Mahan&r. Up. I, 7 ; cf. Vagr. Sawh. 32, i. 
 
 3 Svet. Up. Ill, 9 ; Mahanar. Up. X, ao. 
 
 1 Svet. Up. Ill, 17 ; cf. Bhag. Gita XIII 14. 
 
 5 BrahmaHndu Up. 12. Cf. Bhng. GitA V, T& 
 
 17 S 
 
258 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 in worms and insects, in the outcast, in the dog and the 
 elephant, in beasts, cows, gadflies, and gnats. 
 
 is, 13. As one and the same string passed through gold, 
 and pearls, jewels, corals, porcelain, and silver, thus is one 
 and the same Self to be known as dwelling everywhere in 
 cows, imen, and in elephants, deer/ &c. 
 
 We' see in these extracts a mixture of Vedanta) and 
 Samkhya terms and ideas; and in verse 10 the two views 
 of Brahman being one, and the Purusha being many, are 
 given in the same breath. 
 
 Early Relation "between Vedanta. and Samkhya. 
 
 The relation between Samkhya apd Vedanta during the 
 Upanishad-period is by no means clear. Most scholars 
 seem to regard it as a kind of syncretism, but it may also 
 represent to us a period of philosophic thought when these 
 two views of the world were not yet finally differentiated, 
 and were not felt to be altogether incompatible. Though 
 there is in the Upanishads which we possess a decided pre- 
 ponderance of a Vedantie interpretation of the world, the 
 Sa/mkhya philosophers are not altogether wrong when they 
 maintain that their view also can be supported by Vedic 
 authority. All these views were at first no more than 
 guesses at truth, gropings in the dark ; but the idea that if 
 the one was right the other must be wrong, belongs de- 
 cidedly to a later period, to that of systematized and con- 
 troversial philosophy. There are certain technical terms, 
 such as Purusha, Buddhi, Gwias, &c., which are looked 
 upon as the peculiar property of the Samkhya, and others, 
 such as Atman, Brahman, Avidya, Maya, &c., which remind 
 us at once of the Vedanta-philosophy ; but even these 
 terms are used far more freely in the Brahmawas and 
 Upanishads than in the Daraanas, nor are they always used 
 in the same sense or in the same order by earlier and later 
 authorities. 
 
 Thus we read in the Kanaka Up. Ill, 10, n : 
 
 'Beyond the senses are the objects (Artha), beyond the 
 
 objects is the mind (Manas), beyond A the mind is intellect 
 
 (Buddhi), the Great Self (Mahan Atma) is beyond the 
 
 intellect. Beyond the Great there is the Undeveloped 
 
RELATION BETWEEN VEDANTA AND SAJlfKHYA. 259 
 
 (Avyakta), beyond the undeveloped there is the Purusha. 
 Beyond the Purusha there is nothing, that is the goal, the 
 highest point/ 
 
 In the same TJpanishad, VI, 7, 8, we read: 
 
 ' Beyond .the senses is the mind, beyond the mind the 
 highest being (Sattvam Uttamam), higher than that being 
 is the great Self (Mahan Atma), beyond this great (Self) is 
 the highest, the Undeveloped. 
 
 Beyond the Undeveloped is the Purusha, the all-pervading 
 and imperceptible. Every creature that knows him is 
 liberated, and obtains immortality/ 
 
 The successive development, as here described, is not in 
 strict accordance with the systematic Samkhya, but still 
 less does it represent to us Vedantie ideas. Even the two 
 accounts, as given in the sa.me Upanishad, vary slightly, 
 showing to us how little of technical accuracy there was as 
 yet during the Upanishad -period. We get- 
 Ill, 10, ii. VI, 7, 8. 
 
 1. Indriyas. Indriyas. 
 
 2. Arthas. 
 
 3. Manas. Manas. 
 
 4. Buddhi. A Sattvani Uttamam. 
 
 5. Mahan Atma. Mahan Atma. 
 
 6. Avyakta. Avyakta. 
 
 7. Purusha. Purusha. 
 
 The omission of the Arthas as objects would not signify, 
 because, as Indriyarthas, they are implied by the Indriyas 
 or senses. But why should Buddhi, generally the first 
 emanation of Brakriti in its undeveloped (Avyakta) state, 
 be replaced by Sattvam Uttamam, the Highest Being? 
 The word may be meant for Buddhi, for Buddhi is often 
 called. Mahat, the Great, but why it should be called Great 
 is difficult to say. It is certainly not an equivalent of the 
 Phenician Mot, as Professor Wilson conjectured many y^ears 
 ago 1 . Mahan Atma looks like a Vedantic term, but even 
 then it -would only occupy the place Of Givatma, the indi- 
 
 1 See Sawkhya-Sutras I, 61, 71 ; the Ekadasakam is Sattvikoin, cf. II, 
 18, that is the five Buddhfndriyas, the five Karmentlriyas, and the 
 Manas; sec Garbe, Sawkhya-pravafcana-bhashya, p. 188. 
 
 S 2 
 
260 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 vidualised Self, and how could this be said to emanate from 
 the Avyakta? 
 
 Another passage which reminds us of Samkhya rather 
 than of Vedanta-philosophy occurs in the Mai tray. Up. 
 II, 5, where we read : ' He who has the name of Purusha, 
 and is very small, intangible, invisible, dwells of his own 
 will * here in part 2 , as a man who is fast asleep awakes of 
 his own will. Arid this part, which is entirely intelligent. 
 present in every single man, knowing the body, attested by 
 conceiving (Manas), willing (Bucldhi), and belief in subject 
 and object (Ahamkara) is Pra^apati, called Visva. By him, 
 the intelligent, is the body made intelligent; and he is the 
 driver thereof/ 
 
 This passage does not contain much of Samkhya thought, 
 yet the words Purusha and possibly Bnddhipurvani seem 
 to allude to Kapila's ideas rather than to those of Badara- 
 yana. Other words also, such as Sa?nkalpa, Adhyavasaya 
 and Abhimana, in the sense of Ahamkara, point to the 
 same source. The whole passage, however, is obscure, nor 
 does the commentator help us much, unless he is iight in 
 recognising here the germs of the later Vedantic ideas of 
 a Pra^apati, called Visva or Vaisvanara (Yedanta-sara, 
 138), Taigrasa and Pragma. 
 
 One more passage of the Maitray. Upanishad, III, 2, 
 may here be mentioned, as reminding us of "S&wkbya 
 doctrines. There we read: ' There is indeed that other 
 different one, called the elemental Self (Bhiitatma) who, 
 overcome by the bright and dark fruits of action, enters ou 
 a good or evil birth, so that his course is upward or down- 
 ward, and that overpowered by the pairs (the opposites) he 
 roams about. And this is the explanation. The five 
 Tanmatras (of sound, touch, light, taste, and smell) are 
 called Bhftta (elements), and the five Mahabniitas (gross 
 elements) also are called Bhftta. Then the aggregate of all 
 these is called $arira,body, and he who dwells in that body 
 is called Bhutatman (the elementary Atman). True, his 
 
 1 The Anubhuti-prakasa reads Buddhipurvam ; Deussen translates 
 Abuddhipurvarn. 
 
 2 As to the idea of parts (Amsa), see Vedanta-Sutras II, 3, 43, and 
 Thibaut's remarks in his Introduction, p. xcvii. 
 
KELATIGN BETWEEN VEDANTA AND SAJ^KHYA. 26 1 
 
 immortal Atman (Self) remains untainted, like a drop of 
 water on a lotus-leaf; but he, the Bhutatman, is in the 
 power of the Gunas of Prakriti. Then, thus overpowered, 
 he becomes bewildered, and because thus bewildered, he sees 
 not the creator, i.e. the holy Lord, abiding wft-hin him. 
 Carried along by the Giwas, darkened, unstable, fickle, 
 crippled, full of devices, vacillating, he enters into Abhi- 
 maiid (conceit of subject and object), believing "I am he, 
 this is mine/ 7 &c. He binds himself by himself, as a bird 
 is bound by a net, and, overcome afterwards by the fruits 
 of what he has done, he enters on a good or evil birth, 
 downward or upward in his course, and, overcome by the 
 pairs, he roams about.' 
 
 Here we see again a mixture of Sawkhya and Vedanta 
 ideas, the Samkhya claiming such terms as Prakriti and 
 Gmias, the Vetlanta such terms as Atman and possibly 
 Bhutatman. This Bhutatman, however, is by no means so 
 clear as has sometimes been imagined. It is a term peculiar 
 to the Maitray. Upanishad, and seems to have been 
 borrowed from it when it occurs in some of the later 
 Upanishads. If, like many other things in the Maitray. 
 Upanishad, it is to be looked upon as belonging to the 
 Sawkhya-systein, we must remember that Atman, though 
 quoted sometimes as a synonym of Purusha, cannot be 
 supposed to stand here for Purusha, A compound such 
 as Bhuta-Purusha would be impossible. The Maitray. 
 Up. Ill, i itself says that the^Atraari of Bhutatman is 
 another, though likewise called Atman, and that he dwells 
 in the body, Sarira, which is a compound of Tanmatras, 
 Bhutas, and Mahabhutas, It would therefore correspond 
 to the Vedantic Givatman. But if this Bhutatman is said 
 to spring from Prakriti, it could not possibly stand for the 
 Purusha of the Samkhyris, because their Purusha does not 
 spring from Prakriti, as little as Prakriti springs from him. 
 ;Nor could any Atman be said to be purely objective. In 
 i'acl; strictly speaking, this Bhutatman fits neither into the 
 Vedanta,, nor into the Samkhya-plrilosophy, and would 
 rather seem to belong to a philosophy in which these two 
 views of the world were not yet finally separated. 
 
 Another difficult arid rather obseure expression in the 
 
262 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Maitray. Upamshad is Niratman (selbstlos), an expression 
 which would be impossible in the Vedanta-philosophy, and 
 is certainly perplexing even in the Samkhya. 
 
 A similar mixture of philosophical terms meets us in the 
 /Svetasvatara Upamshad. In verse I, 10, for instance, we 
 have Pradhana, which is Samkhya. and Maya, which is 
 Vedanta, at least the later Vedanta, while in IV, 10 Maya 
 is directly identified with Prakrtti. Purusha occurs in 
 III, 13, where it evidently stands* for Brahman, IV, I. 
 But though in this Upamshad Samkhya ideas would seem 
 to prevail; Vedanta ideas are not excluded. The very name 
 of Sa/mkhya 1 and Yoga occurs (VI, 13), but the name of 
 Vedanta also is not absent, VI, 32. In all this we may 
 possibly get a glimpse -of a state of Indian philosophy 
 which was, as yet, neither pure Samkhya nor pure Vedanta, 
 unless we look on these Upanishads as of a far more 
 modern date, and on their philosophy as the result of a later 
 syncretism, 
 
 IV. If now we return to the Tattva-samasa, we meet 
 first of all with some more remarks about the three Gmias, 
 Sattva, explained as virtue, purit}^ goodness ; Ra(/as, ex- 
 plained as dust, mist, passion, movement, and Tamas, dark- 
 ness, as ignorance. Colebrooke .had already warned us 
 against taking the Gunas of the Samkhya in the sense 
 of qualities, 'These three qualities/ he says, 'are not 
 mere accidents of nature, but are of its essence, and enter 
 into its composition like different rivers forming one stream, 
 though for a time retaining their different colours/ Con- 
 stituent ' parts ' might be a better rendering, out for the 
 present it is best to retain Gmia, there being neither thought 
 nor word in English corresponding to GuTia, as defined in the 
 Samkhya. We ourselves have inherited our ideas of sub- 
 stance and quality from Greek and medieval philosophers, 
 but even with us a definition of inherent qualities is by 
 no means easy, considering that our substances never exist 
 
 1 Samkhya should be here taken as the title of the two systems, Sawkhya 
 and Yoga, or better, still as one word, Sawkhyayoga. It cannot well 
 mean I'rufuny* 
 
TRAIGUA'YA. 263 
 
 without qualities, nor our qualities without substances. 
 Our commentary continues: 
 
 He now asks, What is the triad of GuTias ? and the answer 
 is, the triad consists of Goodness, Passion, and Darkness. 
 The triad of Gwias means the three Ounas. 
 
 Goodness (Sattva) is of endless variety, such as calm- 
 ness, lightness, complacency, attainment of what is wished 
 for, contentment, patience, joy, fee. In short it consists of 
 happiness. 
 
 Passion is of endless variety, such as grief, distress, separa- 
 tion, excitement, attainment of what is evil, &c. In short 
 it consists of pain. 
 
 Darkness is of endless variety, such as covering, ignorance, 
 disgust, misery, heaviness, sloth, drowsiness, intoxication, &c. 
 In short it consists of trouble or madness. 
 
 Thus far has the triad of the Gunas been explained. Let 
 it be known that goodness is all that is bright, passion all 
 that excites, and darkness all that is not bright. This is 
 what is named Traigutiya. 
 
 These Gurtas have been again and again explained as 
 DravyaTii, matter; quality and what is qualified being 
 considered in the Samkhya as inseparable. The four sides 
 of a cube, for instance, would be called its Gunas as much 
 as the blue or the sky. These Guwas act a very prominent 
 part in In.iian philosophy, and have quite entered into the 
 sphere of popular thought. We can best explain them by 
 the general idea of two opposites and the middle term 
 /between them, or as HegeFs thesis, antithesis and synthesis, 
 Ithese being manifested in nature by light, darkness, and 
 mist ; in morals by good, bad, and indifferent, with many 
 applications and modifications. If 'the Samkhyas look on 
 certain objects as happy instead of happifying, &c., we 
 should remember that we also call sugar sweet, meaning 
 that it ealis forth the sensation of sweetness in us. The 
 Hindus look upon the state of equilibrium of the three 
 Gu'/ias as perf feet, and they see in the preponderance of any 
 one of them the first cause of movement and activity in 
 Prakrit! or nature, in. fact the beginning of creation. 
 
264 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 SafR-ara and Pratisail&ara. 
 
 V, VI. Then comes the question, What is Sa/7&ara and 
 what is Pratisa.'7/cara ? The answer is, Satf&ara is evolution, 
 Pratisa>7/cara dissolution or re-involution. * Evolution is as 
 follows : From the Avyakta (undeveloped Prakriti) before 
 explained, when superintended by the high and omnipresent 
 Purusha (Spirit), Buddhi (intellect) arises, and this of eight 
 kinds. From this Buddhi, the substance of intellect, arises 
 Ahamkara (conceit of I, or subjectivity). Ahamkara is of 
 three kinds, Vaikarika, modified, that is, modified of Sattva 1 ; 
 Taigrasa, luihinous, as under the influence of Ra#as pro- 
 ducing the Buddhindriyas ; and Bhutadi (first of elements). 
 From the modified or Vaikarika Ahamkara, which under 
 the influence of Tarn as produces the gross material elements, 
 spring the gods and the senses ; from the first of elements. 
 Bhutadi, the Tanmatras (essences) ; from the luminous, 
 Taiiqrasa, both. From the Tanm&tras, essences, are produced 
 the material elements. This is the development or Sahara. 
 Pratisa.i^&ara or dissolution is as follows: The material 
 elements are dissolved into the essences, Tanrnatras, the 
 essences and senses into Ahamkara, Ahamkara into Buddhi 
 (intellect), Buddhi into Avyakta (the undeveloped), all being 
 different forms of Prakriti. The Undeveloped is nowhere 
 dissolved, because it was never evolved out of anything. 
 Know both Prakriti and Purusha as having no beginning. 
 Thus has dissolution been explained. 
 
 Adfcitolmta, and AdMdaivata. 
 
 VII-IX. Now it is asked. What is meant by Adhyatma 
 (subjective), AdhiBhuto (objective), and Adhidaivata (per- 
 taining to deity)? To this it is answered, Intellect is 
 subjective, what is to be perceived is objective, Brahma is 
 deity. Ahamkara is subjective, what* is to be received and 
 perceived by it is objective, Rudra is the deity. Marias, 
 mind, is subjective, what is to be conceived is objective, 
 A'andra, moon, is the deity . A The ear is subjective, what is 
 to be hoard is objective, Akasa, ether, is the deity. The 
 skin is subjective, what is to be touched is objective, Vayu, 
 
 1 Garbe, Sawkhya-Philosopliie, p. 236, 
 
ABHIBUDDHIS. 265 
 
 wind, is the deit. The eye is subjective, what is to be 
 seen is objective, Aditya, the sun, is the deity. The tongue 
 is subjective, what is to be tasted is objective, Varuna l is 
 the deity. The nose is subjective, what is to be smelled is 
 objective, Earth is the deity. The voice is subjective, what 
 is to be uttered is objective, Agni, fire, is the deity. The 
 two hands are subjective, what is to be grasped is objective, 
 Indra is the deity. The feet are subjective, what has to be 
 gone over is objective, Vishnu is the deity. The organ of 
 excretion is subjective, what is to be excreted is objective, 
 Mitra is the deity. The organ of generation is subjective, 
 what is to be enjoyed is objective, Pra</apati, lord of 
 creatures, is the deity. Thus in the case of each of the 
 thirteen instruments is there what is subjective, what is 
 objective, and the deity. 
 
 Whoever has properly learnt the substances, the forms 
 of the qualities (Gunasvarupa/m), and the deity (Adhi- 
 daivatam) is freed from evil and released from all his 
 sins ; he experiences the qualities (Gunas), but is not united 
 to theln. Here ends the discussion of the Tattvas (sub- 
 stances) 2 . 
 
 AbMtoudcihis (5). 
 
 Xc Now what are the five Abhibuddhis (apprehensions) ? 
 The answer is, They are Vyavasaya, ascertainment, Abhi- 
 mana, conceit, tkkftb, desire, Kartavyata, determination to 
 act or will, Kriya, action. 
 
 The apprehension that this has to be done by me is 
 ascertainment ; an act of the intellect. Abhimana, conceit, 
 is directed towards the perception of the nature of Self and 
 not-Self, it is Ahamkara, an act of the intellect. 1/cfcM, 
 desire, is wish, an idea of the mind, an act of the intellect. 
 Kartavyata, the will of doing such acts as hearing, &c., 
 
 1 Evidently taken already as god of the. wacers. 
 
 3 I ought to say that in this and the subsequent paragraphs I had 
 often to bo satisfied with giving the words such as they stand, without 
 being myself able to connect any definite ideas with them. I did not 
 like to leave them out altogether, but while they may be safely passed 
 over by philosophical readers, they may, I hope, elicit from Sanskrit 
 scholars some better elucidation than I am able to give. At present most 
 of them seem to ine to consist of useless distinctions and hair-splitting 
 definitions of words. 
 
266 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 performed by the senses that have sound, &c., for their 
 objects, is an act of the intellect pertaining to the Bud- 
 dhindriyas. Kriya, the act of the intellect, such as 
 speaking, c., pertaining to the Karmendriyas, is action l . 
 
 Thus have five Abhibuddhis (apprehensions) been ex- 
 
 1*1 
 plained. 
 
 Xarmayonis (5). 
 
 XI. What are the five Karmayonis ? The answer is 
 that they are Dhriti, energy, $raddha, faith or faithfulness, 
 Sukha, bliss, Avividisha, carelessness, Vividisha, desire of 
 knowledge. 
 
 The character of Dhriti or energy is when a man resolves 
 and carries out his resolution. $raddha, faith or faithful- 
 ness, is said to consist in study of theVeda religious student- 
 ship, sacrificing and causing sacrifices to be performed, 
 penance, giving and receiving proper gifts, and making 
 Homa-oblations. 
 
 But Sukha or bliss arises when a man, in order to obtain 
 blessedness, devotes himself to knowledge, sacrifices and 
 penance, being always engaged in penitential acts. 
 
 Avividisha or carelessness consists in the heart's being 
 absorbed in the sweetness of sensual pleasures. 
 
 Vividisha or desire of knowledge is the source of know- 
 ledge of thoughtful people, What has to be known is the 
 oneness (belonging to Prakriti), the separateness (of Purusha 
 and Prakriti), &c., (Prakrit!) being eternal, and not-perci- 
 pient, subtle, with real products, and not to be disturbed ; 
 and this is YividishS,. ... It is a state belonging to Prakriti 
 destroying cause and effect. Thus have the five Kar- 
 mayonis been explained (?). 
 
 Some portions of these verses are obscure, and the text 
 is probably corrupt. I have taken (r/Ieya for GvTeyam, 
 referring to each of the subjects with which Vividisha, the 
 desire of knowledge, is concerned. The construction is very 
 imperfect, but may be excused in what is after all no more 
 than an index. I separate Sukshinain and take it in the 
 sense of Sukshmatvam. Satkaryam refers to the Satkarya- 
 vada. The third line is quite unintelligible to me, and 
 
 1 The text is somewhat (Doubtful. 
 
VAYUS. KAKMATMANS, 2& J 
 
 Ballantyne has very properly left it altogether untrans- 
 lated. It may mean that Vividisha is a state belonging to 
 Prakriti which helps to destroy cause and effect by showing 
 that they are one and the same, but this is a mere guess. 
 
 V&yns (6). 
 
 XII. What are the V&yus (winds)? They are PraTia, 
 Apana, Samana, Ud&na, and Yyana, i.e. the winds in the 
 bodies of those who have bodies. The wind called Pra/r&a 
 is superintended by mouth and nose, and is called PraTia 
 because it leads out or moves out. The wind called Apana 
 is superintended by the navel, and is called Apana because 
 it leads away and moves downward. The wind called 
 Samana is superintended by the heart, and is called Samana 
 because it leads equally and moves equally. The wind 
 called Udana is superintended by the throat. It is called 
 Udana because it goes upward and moves out. Vyana 
 is the all-pervader. Thus have the five winds been ex- 
 plained. 
 
 The real meaning of these winds has never been dis- 
 covered. If they are rendered by vital spirits, nothing is 
 gained except explaining obscurum per obscurius, They 
 may have been intended to account for the vital processes 
 which make the action of the senses (Indriyas) and of 
 other organs of the body also, possible, but their original 
 intention escapes us altogether. They form a kind of 
 physical organism or AntaAkaraTia, but their special func- 
 tions are often stated differently by different authors. 
 
 Kar mt mans (5). 
 
 XIII. What are the five Karmatmans, the (Ego as 
 active)? They are Vaikarika, Tai^asa, Bhutadi, Sanu- 
 mana, and Niranumana. The Vaikarika, modifying, is the 
 doer of good works. The Tai</asa, luminous, is'the doer of 
 bad works. The Bhfttadi l , first of elements, is the doer of 
 hidden works. If associated with inference (Sanumana), 
 the Ahamkara is the doer of what is good and reasonable ; 
 
 1 Bhutadi is used in the sense of Manas, because the Bhutas, though 
 springing from the Tanniatras, are due to it. 
 
268 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 if not associated with inference (Niranumana) it is the doer 
 of what is not good and not reasonable. Thus have the five 
 Karmatmans been explained. 
 
 35Te science (5). 
 
 XIV. What is the fivefold Avidya (Nescience) ? It is 
 Tamas, darkness, Moha, illusion, Mahamoha, great illusion, 
 Tamisra, gloom, Andhatamisra, utter gloom. Here dark- 
 ness and illusion are again each eightfold, great illusion is 
 tenfold, gloom and utter gloom are eighteenfold. Tamas, 
 darkness, is the misconception that Self is identical with 
 things which are not Self, namely with Prakriti, Avyakta, 
 Buddhi, Ahamkara, and the five Taftmatras. Moha, illu- 
 sion, is the misconception arising from the obtainrnent of 
 Supernatural powers, such as minuteness and the rest. 
 Mahamoha, great illusion, is when one supposes oneself to 
 be liberated in the ten states with regard to the objects 
 of sound, colour, &c., whether heard or seen, &c. Gloom is 
 unrestrained hatred, directed against the eightfold Super- 
 human powers, such as minuteness, &c., and against the 
 tenfold world of sense causing threefold pain. Utter 
 gloom is that distress which arises at the time of death 
 after the eightfold human power has been acquired, and 
 the tenfold world of sense has been conquered. Thus has 
 ignorance with sixty-two subdivisions been explained. 
 
 Asakti, Weakness (28). 
 
 XV. What is called the twenty-eightfold weakness? 
 The faults of the eleven organs of sense find the seventeen 
 faults of the intellect. First, with regard to the organs of 
 sense, there is deafness in the ear, dullness in the tongue, 
 leprosy in the skin, blindness in the eye, loss of smell in 
 the noso, dumbness in the voice, cripplcdness in the hands, 
 lameness in the feet, constipation in the organ of excretion, 
 impotence in the organ of generation, madness in the mind ; 
 these are defects of the eleven organs. The seventeen 
 defects of the intellect are the opposites of the Tushlis, 
 contentments, and of the Side! his, perfections. 
 
ATUSH^f AND TUSHJI. ASIDDHIS AND SIDDHIS. 269 
 Atushtt and Tushtt. 
 
 XVI. First then the opposites of the TushZis or the con- 
 tentments. They are Ananta, the conviction that there is 
 no Pradhana (Prakr/ti) ; Tamasalina, consisting in recog- 
 nising the Atman in the Mahat (Buddhi, intellect); Avidya, 
 the non-recognition of the Ego (Ahamkara) ; AvHshZi, the 
 denial that the Tanmatras, essences, are the causes of the 
 elements ; Asutara, occupation in acquiring the objects of 
 the senses ; Asupara, occupation in their preservation ; 
 Asunetra, occupation for wealth, without seeing that it is 
 liable to be lost ; Asumarifcika. addiction to enjoyment ; 
 Anuttamambhasika, engaging in enjoyment without seeing 
 the evil of injury (to living beings). Thus have the nine 
 opposites of Tushtfi, contentment, been explained. 
 
 Asiddhis and Siddfcis, 
 
 XVII. Next follow the opposites of Siddhi, perfection, 
 which -are also called Asiddhis, non-perfections: Atara, 
 when diversity is mistaken for phenomenal unity ; Sutara, 
 when', after hearing; words only,, the opposite is understood, 
 as, for instance, when after hearing that a man who knows 
 the various principles .(tattvas) is liberated, a man under- 
 stands /the opposite, that such a man is not liberated ; 
 Ataratara, ignorance, when a man, thougn devoted to 
 hear ng* and simdying, does not succeed in knowing the 
 twenty-five principles, owing either to his obtuseness or to 
 his intellect being impaired by false doctrines. If a man, 
 though overcome by mental suffering, is not anxious to 
 know, being careless as to transmigration, so that know- 
 ledge is no pleasure to him, this is Apramoda. Thus the 
 next pair also of Apramudita (mutually not delighted) and 
 Apramodam&na (mutually not delighting) should be con- 
 sidered. Ignorance of a man of undecided mind even with 
 regard to what has been taught him by a friend is Arasya. 
 But failure of an unfortunate man in obtaining knowledge, 
 either because of bad instruction or disregard on the part 
 of the teacher, is Asatpramuditam. Thus have the eight 
 Asiddhis, the opposite of the Siddhis or perfections, been 
 explained, and the twenty- eightfold Asakti (weakness) is 
 finished. 
 
270 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Tnsfcfis and SiddMs. 
 
 Next follow the r f ushis and Siddhis themselves, but as 
 their opposites have already been examined we may dis- 
 pense with their enumeration here. Some of these technical 
 terms vary in different texts, but they are of very small 
 importance 1 . I am afraid that even what I have given of 
 these long lists, which are so characteristic of the Samkhya- 
 philosophy, may have proved very tedious, and not very 
 closely connected with *the great problems of philosophy. 
 I confess that 'in several cases many of these subdivisions 
 seemed to me entirely meaningless, but I thought that 
 they were of some importance historically, and for a right 
 appreciation of the methods of Indian philosophy. The 
 long lists of the instruments and the acts of intellect, of 
 the sources of activity, of Nescience with its sixty-two 
 subdivisions, &c., though certainly meaningless to my 
 mind, may possibly serve to show how long and how 
 minutely these philosophical questions must have been 
 discussed in order to leave such spoils behind. This large 
 number of technical terms is certainly surprising. Some 
 of them, as, for instance, SuM, Pada, Avadharita, &c., are 
 not mentioned either in the Karikas or in the Sutras, and 
 this, which has been taken for a sign of their more, recent 
 date, seems to me, on the contrary, to speak in favour of 
 an early and independent origin of the Tattva-sanlasa and 
 its commentary. If these technical terms were modern 
 inventions, they would occur more frequently in modern 
 works on the S&mkhya-philosophy, but as far as I know, 
 they do not. 
 
 XVIII. We have still to examine, though as briefly as 
 possible, the Mulikarthas or eight cardinal facts, that is, 
 the most important subjects established by the Samkhya 2 . 
 They are with regard to Prakriti or Pradhana, its reality 
 (Astitva), its oneness (Ekatva), its having an object or an 
 
 1 The names of the nine Tushfls or contentments are : Ambhas, water, 
 Salila, Ogha, Vnshrt, Sutftrft, Supftra, Sunotra, Sumari/cika, Uttama 
 Sattviki. The names of the eight Siddhis are : Tara, Sutara, Tarayanti, 
 Pramoda, Pramudita, Pramodamfina, Ramyaka, Satpramudita. 
 
 a &oc Sawkhya-tattva-kaumudi, p. 59. 
 
SHASETl-TANTRA. ANUGRAHA-SARGA. 271 
 
 intention (Arthavattva), and its being intended for some 
 one else (Parartbya). They are with regard to Purusha 
 his being different from Prakriti (Anyatva), his not being 
 an agent (Akartritva), and his being many (Bahutva). 
 They are with regard to both PrakHti and Purusha, their 
 -temporary union and separation, while Sthiti, durability, is 
 said to refer to the Sukshma- and Sthula-sarira, the gross 
 and the subtle bodies. Astitva, reality, might seem to 
 belong to both Prakriti and Purusha, but it is meant as 
 the reality of Prakriti only, which the Samkhya is chiefly 
 concerned with establishing as against the Vedantins who 
 deny it with regard to all that is objective, keeping A it for 
 the subject only, whether he is called Purusha or Atman, 
 The commentator, however, and Prof. Garbe also, connect 
 Astitva with Purusha as well as with Prakriti. The matter 
 is of little consequence, unless Astitva is taken in the sense 
 of phenomenal or perceptible reality. The highest reality 
 of the Purusha or the Atman has of course never been 
 doubted by Samkhya or Vedanta philosophers, but that is 
 more than mere Astitva. 
 
 Shaslili-tantra. 
 
 It should be added that the commentator in this place 
 accounts once more for the name of Sliashti-tantra, the 
 Sixty-doctrine, but this time by adding the 17 Tushris and 
 Siddhis, the 33 (Avidya 5-f-Asakti "38) and TO, not 8, 
 Mulikarthas, and thus arriving at 60 topics. The Chinese 
 name presupposes a Saptati-sastra, or Seventy-treatise, 
 probably with reference to the original number of verses 
 in the.Karika. 
 
 Anugraha-sarga. 
 
 XIX. But even here the Tattva-samasa is not yet 
 finished, for it goes on to explain the Anugraha-sarga, lit. 
 the creation of benevolence, which is explained as the pro- 
 duction of external objects from the five Tanmatras or 
 subtle essences for the sake of the Purusha. Brahma, after- 
 seeing these (the organs of sense ?) produced, but as yet 
 without a sphere in which their measuring or perceiving 
 
272 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 power could find scope, created for them the so-called 
 benevolent creation, shaped from the Tanmatras 1 . 
 
 Bhuta-sarga. 
 
 XX. After this follows the Bhuta-sarg* in fourteen divi- 
 sions. The divine creation has eight divisions, consisting 
 of good and evil spirits and gods, such as Pisafcas, Rakshas, 
 Yaksha-s, Gandharvas, Indra, Pra^rapati, and Brahma. The 
 animated creation consists of domestic animals, birds, wild 
 animals, reptiles, and immovable things or plants. The 
 human creati'on consists of one, of man only, from Brah- 
 mans down to ITaricZalas. Domestic animals are from cows 
 down to mice ; birds from Garuda down to gnats ; wild 
 animals from lions down to jackals ; reptiles from $esha 
 (world -serpent) down to worms ; immovable things from 
 the Parijgrata-tree (in paradise) down to grass. This is the 
 threefold creation, consisting of gods, men, and animals, 
 the animals, i. e. living beings, forming again five classes. 
 
 Bandlia, Bondage. 
 
 XXL If it be asked what the threefold bondage (Bandha) 
 consists in, it is replied, In the eight Prakritis, in the 
 sixteen Vikaras, and in DakshiTia (gifts to priests). There 
 are eight Prakritis, as often described before (pp. 244, 251); 
 and as long as a man considers these as the highest, he is 
 absorbed in Prakrit! and bound by Prakriti The" bondage 
 of the sixteen Vikaras applies both to ascetics and to men 
 of the world, if they are subdued by the senses, which are 
 Vikaras, if they are devoted to objects of sense, if their 
 organs of sense are not in subjection, if they are ignorant 
 and deluded by passions. 
 
 Dakshina-boxidagre, Gifts to Priests. 
 
 The priestly bondage applies to those, whether house- 
 holders, students, mendicants or anchorets, whose minds 
 are overcome by passions and delusions, and who from 
 misconception bestow sacrificial gifts on priests. A verse 
 is quoted here in support : c Bondage is spoken of by the 
 
 1 This passage is very doubtful, unloss we connect Mana with Tanmatra, 
 and take measuring in the sense pf perceiving, so that the creation would 
 be represented as made for man. 
 
PRAMAJVTA8. 273 
 
 name of Prakrtti-bondage, Vikara-bondage, and thirdly 
 bondage through priestly gifts/ This last bondage seems 
 to me very important, and it is strange that it should never 
 have been pointed out as marking the unecclesiastical 
 and unorthodox character of the Samkhya-philosophy 1 . 
 What would have become of the Brahmans without their 
 DakshiTias or fees, the very name of a Brahman being 
 DakshiTiiya, one to be fee'd? In the Aitareya-Br&hma7ia 
 already we read of Yatis who condemned sacrifices, but 
 they are said to have been thrown to the jackals. That 
 this feeing of a priest should have been considered one of 
 the three bondages shows at all events that the followers 
 of Kapila were above superstition, and looked upon sacrifice 
 and priestcraft as hindrances, rather than as helps to true 
 freedom and'Moksha of the spirit. 
 
 Moksha. 
 
 XXII. This Moksha, the highest aim of Kapila's philo- 
 sophy, is again of three kinds, according as it arises from 
 increase of knowledge, from the quieting of the passions of 
 the senses, or lastly from the destruction of the whole. 
 From increase of knowledge and quieting of the passions 
 of the senses there arises the destruction of all that is 
 commonly considered as merit and demerit ; and from the 
 destruction of merit and demerit there arises final beatitude 
 consisting in complete detachment from the world, and in 
 concentration of the Purusha in himself. 
 
 Fram&nas. 
 
 XXIII. The three Prama/ias which follow next require 
 little explanation here, as they have been fully examined 
 before 2 . Still each system of philosophy takes its own 
 view of them, and the character of each is more or less 
 determinedly the view taken of the real nature of know- 
 ledge. What is most creditable is that each system should - 
 have recognised the importance of this question, as a pre- 
 liminary to every philosophy. This distinguishes Indian 
 philosophy very favourably from other philosophies. All 
 systems of philosophy in India admit Pratyaksha or per- 
 
 1 See, however, KarikA 44. 2 p. 143. 
 
 18 T 
 
274 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 ception of the senses as the first of Pram&nas. The Vedanta, 
 however, looks upon the Veda as the only source of true 
 knowledge, and actually applies to it the name of Pratya?- 
 ksha. The ordinary three or six PramaTias of the Mimamsa 
 would apply to the world of Avidya or nescience only, 
 never to the true world of Brahman. See Vedanta-Siitras 
 II, i, 14. The names vary sometimes, but the meaning is 
 the same. Sensuous perception, if it is meant for what is 
 perceived, is sometimes called Drishtfam, what is seen;^ and 
 instead of Veda we meet with /Sabda, word, and Apta- 
 va&ana (Samkhya), right affirmation. Anumana, inference, 
 is illustrated by the usual examples, such as, inference of 
 rain from the rising of clouds, inference of water from the 
 appearance of cranes, inference of fire from the rising of 
 smoke. Whatever cannot bej^roved by either sense or 
 inference has to be accepted as Apta- vafcana, as, for instance, 
 the existence of Indra, the king of 'the gods, the Northern 
 Kurus, Meru, the golden mountain, the Apsaras, or nymphs 
 of Svarga, &c. For all these things, Munis such as Vasish^a 
 must be accepted as authorities. Apta is explained as 
 a name for a man who is assiduous in his work, free from 
 hatred and passion, learned, and endowed with all virtues, 
 and who can therefore be relied upon. These three Pramamis, 
 or measures, are so called because in the same way as in 
 common life grains are measured by measures" such as 
 a Prastha, and sandal wood, &c., weighed by a balance, the 
 Tattvas also, the principles, the Bhavas (their modifica- 
 tions), and the Bhutas, elemental substances, are measured 
 or proved by the Prama/ft/as. 
 
 DuAkha. 
 
 XXIV. The last' paragraph in the Taotva-samasa points 
 back to the first. We saw in the beginning how a Brahman 
 was introduced who, overcome by threefold pain, took 
 refuge with the great .Zfo'shi Kapila. If we ask what was 
 meant by that threefold pain, the answer is that it is 
 Adhyatmika, Adhibhautika, and Adhidaivika. Adhyatmika 
 is pain arising from the body, whether produced by wind, 
 bilo, or phlegm, &c., and from the mind (Manas), such as 
 is due to desire, anger, greed, folly, envy, separation from 
 
THE TRUE MEANING OF THE SAJlfKHYA. 275 
 
 what is liked, union with what is disliked, &c. Adhibhau- 
 tika is pain that arises from other living beings, such as 
 thieves, cattle, wild beasts, &c. Adhidaivika is pain that 
 is caused by divine agents, as pain arising from cold, heat, 
 wind, rain, thunderbolts, &c., all under the direction of the 
 Vedic Devas. If a Brahman is affected by this threefold 
 pain, a desire to know (the reason) arises in him, as a desire 
 for water arises in a thirsty man. Freedom from pain, or 
 final beatitude, is to be gained, as we are told, from a study 
 of the Tattva-samasa. Whoever knows the philosophy 
 which is contained in the Tattva-samasa, is not born again. 
 This is the doctrine of the great sage Kapila, and thus is 
 finished the commentary on the Sutras of the Tattva-samasa. 
 
 The True Meaning- of the Samkliya. 
 
 In giving an account of the Sa/mkhya, I have followed 
 entirely the Tattva-amasa, without mixing it up with the 
 Karikas or Sutras. I was quite aware that the Karikas or 
 the Sfttras might have supplied us with a clearer and 
 better-arranged account of that philosophy. But if I am 
 right, that the Tattva-samasa is older than either, it seemed 
 to me more important that we should know what the 
 Samkhya really was in its original form. By comparing 
 the Tattva-samasa with the Karikas and Sutras, we can 
 easily see how this dry system was developed in later 
 times. But though- the Karikas and Sutras give us a more 
 systematic account of the Samkhya, all that is essential 
 can be found in the Samasa, if only we try to arrange the 
 dry facts for ourselves. It must be confessed, no doubt, 
 that neither in the Sutras, the Karikas, nor in the Tattva- 
 samasa, do we find what we most value in every philosophy, 
 an insight into the mind and heart of the founder of that 
 philosophical system. If we wore asked why such a system 
 should ever have been imagined and elaborated, or what 
 kind of comfort, whether intellectual or moral, it could 
 have afforded to any human being, we should indeed have 
 little to answer. All we can learn is that a man crushed 
 by the burden of what is called the threefold misery, and 
 seeing no hope of relief either by means of good actions or 
 of sacrifices, which can promise no more than a temporary 
 
 T a 
 
276 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 happiness on earth or in Heaven, should seek advice from 
 a philosopher, such as Kapila, believing that he could pro- 
 cure for him entire freedom from all his troubles. 
 
 Nature of Fain. 
 
 Here we come across something like a really human 
 sentiment. We can well understand why pain, not only as 
 actual suffering, but as an apparent anomaly or imperfec- 
 tion in the universe, should have opened man's eyes to the 
 fact that there was something wrong or limited in his 
 nature, and in the world in which he found himself ; and 
 it is quite intelligible that this consciousness of his limita- 
 tion-should have acted as the first impulse to an inquiry 
 for the cause of it. This would naturally lead either to 
 a religious or to a philosophical solution, and it certainly 
 did so in India. A religion must have existed already 
 before this question of the origin of suffering could well 
 have been mooted : but religion seems rather to have in- 
 creased the difficulty of the questioner than solved it. The 
 gods or god, even in their imperfect conception, were 
 generally supposed to be good and just. How then could 
 they be the authors of human suffering, particularly of 
 that suffering, bodily or mental, for which the individual 
 was clearly not responsible, such as being ' born blind, or 
 deaf, or dumb, or mad/ This seems to have been keenly 
 felt by the ancient Indian philosophers, who shrink from 
 charging any divine power with injustice or cruelty to- 
 wards men, however low an opinion they may otherwise 
 have formed of Indra and Agni, nay even of Pra^apati, 
 Visvakarman or Brahma. 
 
 Here then it was that philosophy was called in, nay was 
 first brought to life, and the answer which it gave as to 
 the origin of suffering or, in a wider sense, the origin of 
 evil, was that all that seemed wrong in the world must 
 have been the effect of causes, of deeds done, if not in this, 
 then in a former life. No deed (Karman) good or bad, 
 small or great, could ever be without its effect, its reward 
 or punishment. This was the fundamental principle of 
 their ethics, and an excellent principle it was. It was but 
 another version of what we mean by eternal punishment, 
 
NATURE OP PAIN. 277 
 
 without which the world would fall to pieces ; for it has 
 rightly been observed that eternal punishment is in reality 
 but another name for eternal love. This idea of eternal 
 love, however, cannot hang in the air, it presupposes an 
 eternal lover, a personal God, a creator and ruler of the 
 world: but even this idea Indian philosophers would not 
 have taken for granted. In some cases, though allowing 
 deeds to have their effects, they went so far as to admit at 
 least the superintending care of a Divine Being, just as the 
 giver of rain enables seeds to grow, though the seeds them- 
 selves were the deeds performed by men, as independent 
 actors, and therefore liable to take all their consequences 
 upon themselves, whether good or evil. 
 
 But though this ought to have sufficed to convince men 
 that the world was exactly as it ought to be, and could not 
 have been otherwise, because man himself had made it 
 what it was, whether as an individual or as a member of 
 a class, there arose a new question which could not well be 
 suppressed, namely, Whether it was beyond the power of 
 man ever to put an end to the unbroken and irresistible 
 sequence of the effects of the deeds of himself and of his 
 fellow creatures; whether, in facfc, the cycle of life and 
 death, or what was called Samsara, would go on for ever. 
 And here the bold answer was, Yes, the Samsara can be 
 stopped, * man's former acts can be shaken off and an- 
 nihilated, but by one means only, by means of knowledge 
 or philosophy. In order to achieve this deliverance from 
 all suffering, from all limitation, from all the bondage of 
 bhe world, man must learn what he really is. He must 
 learn that he is not the body, for the body decays and dies, 
 and with it all bodily sufferings might seem to end. But 
 this is again denied, because through an invisible agency 
 (Ad?'d'sha or Apftrva) a new Ego would spring up, liable to 
 suffer for its former acts, just as it was in this life. A man 
 must learn therefore that he is not even what is meant by 
 the Ego, for the Ego also has been formed by surroundings 
 or circumstances, and will vanish again like everything 
 else. Then what remains'? There remains behind the 
 body, and behind the Ego, or the individual person, what 
 is called the Purusha or* the Atmaii, the Self, and that Self 
 
278 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 is to be recognised either as identical with what was in 
 earlier times conceived and called the Divine, the Eternal, 
 the Unconditioned, namely. Brahman, or as Purusha, per- 
 fect, independent, and absolute iji itself, blissful in its 
 independence and in the complete aloofness from every- 
 thing else. The former was, as we saw, the view of the 
 Vedanta, the latter is the view of the Samkhya-philosophy. 
 Both may have had the same roots, but they differ in their 
 later growth. The view which the Vedanta took of man 
 has sometimes been mistaken for human apotheosis. But 
 people forget that for these philosophers there were no 
 t^eoi left whose company man could have joined, and whose 
 eminence they could have reached. The Divine which 
 they meant was the Divine in man, and what they wanted 
 was reconciliation between the Divine within and the 
 Divine without. Their Moksha or Nirvana was not meant 
 for Vergotterung, not even for the Vergottung of Eckhart ; 
 it was meant for complete freedom, freedom from all 
 conditions and limitations, selfdom, in fact ?/v whether as 
 recovery of the Divine as Brahman, or as Atman, or as 
 something beyond all names that had ever been given to 
 the Divine, as the eternal Subject, undetermined by any 
 qualities, satisfied and blissful in his own being and in his 
 own thinking. 
 
 Whatever we may think of these two solutions of the 
 world's great riddle, we cannot but admire their originality 
 and their daring, particularly if we compare them with 
 the solutions proposed by other philosophers, whether of 
 ancient or modern times. None of them seems to me to 
 have so completely realised what may be called the idea of 
 the soul as the Phoenix, consumed by the fire of thought 
 and rising from his own ashes, soaring towards regions 
 which are more real than anything that can be called real 
 in this life. Such views cannot be criticised as we criticise 
 ordinary systems of religion or morality. They are visions, 
 if you like, but they are visions which, to have seen is like 
 having been admitted to the vision of another world ; of 
 A world that must exist, however different in its eternal 
 silence from what we and from what the ancient seers of 
 India imagined it to be. 
 
VEDANTA AND SAJ/KflYA. 279 
 
 The most curious tiling is that such views could be held 
 by the philosophers of India without bringing them into 
 conflict with the representatives of the ancient religion of 
 the country. It is true that the Samkhya-philosophy was 
 accused of atheism, but that atheism was very different 
 from what we mean by it. It was the negation of the 
 necessity of admitting an active or limited personal god, 
 arid hence was carefully distinguished in India from the 
 atheism of the Nastikas or nihilists, who denied the ex- 
 istence of anything transcendent, of anything beyond our 
 bodily senses, of anything divine. To call the feamkhya 
 atheistic, and the Vedanta not, would be philosophically 
 most unfair, and it does the Indian priesthood great credit 
 that they treated both systems as orthodox, or at all events 
 as not prohibited, provided always that the students had, 
 by a previous severe discipline, acquired the strength and 
 fitness necessary for so arduous a task. 
 
 How different the world of thought in India was from 
 our own, we may see by an extraordinary defence set up 
 for the so-called atheism of the Samkhya-philosophy. It 
 seems to us perfectly absurd, but it was by 110 nieans so/ it- 
 we consider the popular superstitions of the Hindus at the 
 time. It was a common belief in India that man could, 
 by severe penance, raise himself to the status of a god, 
 or Deva. There are ever so many legends to that effect. 
 This might no doubt be called apotheosis ; and it was 
 expressly stated that it was in order to put an end tc^such 
 vain desires of becoming personal g6ds that Kapila ignored 
 or left out of \aestion the existence of such theomorphic or 
 anthropomorphic beings as could ever excite the rivalry of 
 men. We are hardly prepared for such explanations, and 
 yet in India they seem quite bond fide. 
 
 Vedanta and Samkhya. 
 
 We have thus finished our account of the Vedanta and 
 of the Sumkhya-philosophy. At first sight no two philo- 
 sophies would seem to be so different from each other, nay, 
 to start from such opposite points of view as the Ved&nta 
 and the S&mkhya. - The Yedantist of the school of am- 
 kara looks upon the whole world, including animate and 
 
280 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 inanimate nature, including the small gods and the still 
 smaller men, as a phenomenal manifestation of an unknown 
 power which he calls Brahman. There is nothing beside 
 it, nothing that can be called real except this one invisible 
 Brahman. Then came the question, But whence this pheno- 
 menal world ? or rather, as he starts with the idea of there 
 being but one real being from eternity to eternity, How 
 could that Eternal Brahman ever give rise to the world, 
 not only as its efficient, but also as its material cause, if 
 indeed there is anything material in the objects known to 
 the Vedantist ? Under the circumstances thus given, but 
 one answer is possible, That Brahman is the world, and 
 that the world, so far as it is Brahman, but so far only, is 
 real. The phenomenal world, such as we see it and live in 
 it, is changeful, ever passing away, and consequently never, 
 in the Vedantic sense of that word, real. We never see it 
 or know it, as it really is, until we have become Vedantists, 
 It is impossible to think that this eternal Being, whatever 
 name be given to it, could ever change or be changed. This 
 view of the universe as a development of Brahman was 
 possibly the original view taken by BadarayaTia, and it 
 was clearly that of Ramanugra and his followers, who 
 explain the world as an evolution (Parmama). But this 
 was not $amkara's theory* He accepts the two facts that 
 the world is changing and unreal, and yet that the real 
 cause of it, that is, Brahman, is incapable of change. 
 
 Ved&nta, Avidyft,, and Aviveka. 
 
 Hence nothing remains but to ascribe the changeful 
 phenomenal character of the world to something else, and, 
 according to the Vedanta, to ignorance, not, however, to 
 our individual ignorance, but to some primeval ignorance 
 directed towards Brahman as manifested and seen. This 
 ignorance or Avidya, again, is not to be called real, it is 
 nothing by the side of Brahman, nothing therefore that 
 could ever have dominion over Brahman. All such views 
 are excluded by the postulate that Brahman is free, is one 
 and all ; though here again, other Vedstntists differ from 
 amkara, and represent Avidya as an actual power ($akti) 
 of Brahman, or as M&y&, i. e. illusive power, which in fact 
 
SAJ/KHYA, AVIVEKA. 28 i 
 
 performs, or is answerable for what we call creation. We 
 should of course ask at once, Whence comes that Avidya or 
 that Maya, and what is it ? How can it be anything, if not 
 again Brahman, the only thing that exists? The answer 
 given by $amkara, which satisfied his mind, if not the 
 minds of other Vedaiitists, was that we know as a fact 
 that Avidya or Nescience is there, but we also know that 
 it is not there, as soon as we see through it, in fact, as 
 soon as we are able to annihilate it by Vidya or knowledge, 
 such as is given to us by the Yedanta-philosophy. The 
 Vedantist holds that nothing that can be annihilated can 
 claim true reality for itself. Therefore Avidya, though it 
 is, must not be called something real. The great difficulty 
 how Brahman could ever be affected by Avidya, which is 
 a weakness or a defect, is avoided by looking upon Brah- 
 man, while affected by Avidya or seen through Avidya, as 
 for the time under a cloud or forgetful of itself, but never 
 really unreal. We ourselves also, that is the individual 
 souls, can be in full reality nothing but Brahman, though 
 for a while we are divided from it, because forgetful of 
 Brahman through Avidya. While that state of Avidya 
 lasts the true Brahman, neuter, may become to us Brahma, 
 masculine, may become the creator and ruler of the world, 
 and, as such, receive worship from his creatures. But as 
 soon as -the cloud of Avidya is lifted, this creator also re- 
 cedes and is restored at once to his true state and dignity. 
 He, the so-called tsvara, or Lord, or Creator, becomes what 
 he is and always has been, the whole Brahman ; and we 
 ourselves also remember and thereby recover our true 
 Brahmahood, or Selfhood, not as if we had ever been 
 divided from it, but only as having been blinded* for a 
 while by Avidya so as to forget ourselves, our true Self, 
 that is Brahman. 
 
 S&mkliya, Aviveka. 
 
 The Sa/mkhya takes what seems a very different attitude 
 towards the problem of the world. These attitudes towards 
 the world form indeed the kernel of every philosophy. If 
 we call the Ved&nta monistic, the Samkhya is decidedly 
 dualistic. It accepts the whole objective universe as real, 
 
282 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 and calls it Prakr^ti, a word often translated by Nature, 
 but in reality untranslatable, because the idea which it 
 represents has never arisen in our philosophy. Prakr/ti may. 
 be called the undeveloped matter or Urbtoff, containing in 
 itself the possibilities of all things. By itself it has no 
 consciousness, it simply grows or develops into conscious- 
 ness when seen by Purusha. And it develops not only 
 into an objective or material world, but at the same time, 
 into what we should call the subjective or intellectual world, 
 supplying the instruments of perception and thought, both 
 what perceives and what is perceived. The "question 
 whence it came is never asked, as little as we could ask 
 that question with regard to Brahman. It is, it has been, 
 and it has had no beginning. But^in order to account for 
 the world of experience, it is supposed that this undeveloped 
 Prakriti is always operative, so long as it is noticed or 
 perceived by a Purusha (Self), and always passing through 
 a process of evolution. This is an important condition. 
 Prakriti is at work so long only as it is perceived by 
 a Purusha or a true Self. This would come very near to 
 the recognition of the subjectivity of all our knowledge, 
 and to the recognition that the world exists for us in the 
 form of knowledge only. If we call Prakriti matter, the 
 Samkhya philosopher saw clearly enough that dead, dull, 
 .inert matter alone would not account for the world. There- 
 fore he makes Prakriti, under the eye of a Purusha, 
 develop into Buddhi, commonly translated by perception, 
 but really a kind of perception that involves something 
 like what we should call intellect (vovs). What, as far as 
 I can see, is really meant by Buddhi in this place, is the 
 lighting up of Prakriti or dull matter by intelligence, so 
 as to render it perceptive, and also perceptible. It is the 
 Indian ' Let there be light/ In this stage Prakriti is called 
 Mahat, the jjreat, possibly in order to indicate its impor- 
 tance in the great development of the universe. It cannot 
 be taken here in an exclusively psychological seme, though 
 it supplies, no doubt, the possibility of the intelligence of 
 the individual also. In the cosmical sense the development 
 of the world is often spoken of as Samashti, in the psycho- 
 logical sense, ana as applied to each individual it goes by 
 
SAJfKHYA, AV1VEKA. 283 
 
 the name of Vyash^i. Thus Vif//7ana-Bhikshu (Samkhya- 
 Sutras I, 63) remarks : As, according to passages of Sruti 
 and Smriti, such as (JiMnd. Up. VI, 2, 3) ' Let me multiply 
 myself, let me procreate/ the creation of the elements, c., 
 is preceded by Abhimana (i.e. Ahamkara or subjectivity), 
 it follows that this Abhimana is really the cause of the 
 creation of the world, as preceded by an activity of Buddhi, 
 i.e. the cosmical Buddhi, and not simply the personal organ 
 of deciding, as Buddhi is generally explained when part of 
 the individual or psychological development. For short- 
 ness sake, it is sometimes said that Abhimana or Ahamkara 
 is the cause of creation, for in the end all the Vikaras or 
 evolutes serve one and the same purpose. Buddhi exists 
 in human nature as the power of perception, and it is then, 
 though not quite correctly, identified with Manas or AntaA- 
 kara??a, the mental activity going on within us, which 
 combines and regulates the impressions of the senses, as we 
 shall see hereafter. But as a cosmic force, Buddhi is that 
 which gives light as the essential condition of all know- 
 ledge; and is afterwards developed into the senses, the 
 powers of light and thought, two ideas often comprehended 
 by the root Budh, to awaken or to perceive. Budh means 
 literally to awake. And as a sleeping person is dull and 
 inert to the world, but begins to perceive as soon as he is 
 awake, 'Prakriti also is inert till it is awakened (Pra- 
 buddha),and thus becomes Buddhi, perceiving or perception. 
 This Buddhi, however, which, as we must always 
 remember, is here conceived as a development of Prakriti, 
 and *is, as yet, neither subjective nor objective, requires 
 a new development before it can serve for conscious 
 intellectual -work. Perception, according to the Samkhya, 
 cannot work without Ahamkara, literally I-making or 
 Egoism, but philosophically used with a much larger 
 meaning, namely, if I am right, as that which produces 
 the sense of subject, and in consequence of object also. 
 Nature, in spite of being lighted up or rendered capable of 
 perceiving and being perceived, requires, 3ven after it has 
 reached the stage of Buddhi, the division of the whole 
 world, that is, of itself, into subject and object, before any 
 real perception can take place. Subjectivation, therefore, 
 
284 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 would seem to be the nearest approach, though naturally 
 there can be no subject! vation without simultaneous objee- 
 tivation. 
 
 After this development of Prakriti into Buddhi, and its 
 differentiation as subjective and objective, the next step is 
 that it produces the Tanmatras, the elements of the senses 
 as well as of the sense-objects, such as sight and light, 
 hearing and sound, smelling and odour, tasting and savour, 
 feeling and touch. All these, the faculties as well as the 
 corresponding qualities of sense-perception, are modifica- 
 tions of the same Prakriti, and therefore in one sense the 
 same thing, only viewed from different points of view, as 
 we should say, as subjective and objective, and as changed 
 at last into the material reality of the sentient powers on 
 one side, and the objective world on the other. Lastly, all 
 this development remains without real consciousness, till it 
 attracts the attention of some Purusha, Spirit or Self, who 
 by becoming conscious of PrakHti and all its works, pro- 
 duces what is the only reality of which we have any 
 conception, the phenomenal reality of a self-conscious* soul. 
 I hope I have understood this train of thought rightly, but 
 there is much that requires fuller light. Does Kapila 
 really look upon perception and thought as an instrument, 
 ready made by Prak?*iti for the use of the Purusha, but 
 remaining inert, like a telescope, till it is looked through 
 by the Purusha, or is it the first glance of Purusha at 
 Prakriti in its state of Avyakta or chaos, that gives the 
 first impulse to the activity of Prakriti, which impulse 
 is generally ascribed to the working of the Gunas? Much 
 may be said for either view. I do not feel competent to 
 pronounce so decided an opinion as others have done on this 
 subject. 
 
 If the Vedantist explains what we call Creation as the 
 result of Avidya or Nescience, the Samkhya explains it by 
 the temporary union between Purusha and Prakrzti. This 
 union is said to arise from a want of discrimination 
 (Aviveka), and it is not in the highest sense a real union, 
 because it vanishes again by discriminating knowledge 
 (Viveka), nay, it is actually said to have the one object 
 only of evoking at last in the Purusha a revulsion, and in 
 
ATM AN AND PUEUSHA. 285 
 
 the end a clear recognition of his complete independence, 
 and his freedom from Prakriti (Krik& 66); Thus the 
 creation of the phenomenal world and our position in the 
 phenomenal world are due to Nescience (Avidya) with 
 the Vedantist, but to a want of discrimination (Aviveka) 
 with the Samkhya philosopher (S. S. I, 55), and this want 
 of discrimination is actually called by the Vedantie term of 
 Avidya in the Yoga-Sutras II, 24. Where then, we may 
 well ask, is the difference between the two views of the 
 universe ? There is a difference in the mode of representa- 
 tion, no doubt, but in the end both Vedanta' and S&mkhya 
 look upon what we call reality as the result of a temporary 
 error, call it nescience, illusion, want of discrimination, or 
 anything else. If, therefore, philosophers like Vi#/7ana- 
 Bhikshu recognised this original similarity in the tendencies 
 both of the Vedanta and the Samkhya, it is hardly fair to 
 blame them as having mixed and confounded the two. No 
 doubt these two philosophies diverged in their later develop- 
 ment, but they started with the same object in view, and 
 they advanced for a time in the same direction. If the 
 Vedantists desired to arrive at what A is called Atm&- 
 anatma-viveka, discrimination between Atman and Anat- 
 man, the Samkhyas looked forward to Prakriti-purusha- 
 viveka, discrimination between Purusha and Prakriti. 
 Where then is the difference 1 If their later defenders forgot 
 their common interest and laid greater stress on the points 
 of difference than on the points of similarity between them, 
 it was but right that those who could see deeper, should 
 bring to light whatever features there were left of the 
 original family likeness between the two philosophies. 
 
 Atman and Fnrnsha. 
 
 Greater, however, than the difference between Nescience, 
 Avidya, and want of discrimination, Aviveka, as the causes 
 of the world, according to Vedanta and Samkhya, is that 
 between the Brahman of the Vedanta, and the many 
 Purushas of the Samkhya. According to $amkara the 
 individual souls are not, according to Kapila they are. 
 According to the former there is in reality but one Atman 
 or Self, as it were, one sun rcllected in the countless waves 
 
286 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 of the world-ocean ; according to the Latter there are many 
 Purushas, as many as there are divine, human, animal, and 
 vegetal souls, and their plurality is conceived as eternal,- 
 not as phenomenal only. On this point, therefore, there is 
 a radical difference ; and this is due, as it seems to me, to 
 a want of accurate reasoning on the part of the Samkhyas. 
 Such a peculiarity must not be slurred over in an account 
 of the Samkhya-philosophy, but it is fair to point out what 
 the reason of this aberration may have been. From a 
 higher point of view the Purusjia of Kapila is really the 
 same as the Brahman or the Atman of the Vedanta, the 
 absolute subject. It differs only in that the Purusha was 
 never conceived as the material cause of the universe, while 
 Brahman was, though, of course, with the important pro- 
 viso that everything material was due to Nescience. Apart 
 from that, if the Purusha was meant as absolute, as eternal, 
 immortal, and unconditioned, it ought to have been clear to 
 Kapila that the plurality of such a Purusha would involve 
 its being limited, determined or conditioned, and would 
 render the character of it self-contradictory. Kapila has 
 certainly brought forward every possible argument in 
 support of the plurality of individual Purushas, but ho 
 has forgotten that every plurality presupposes an original 
 unity, and that as trees in the last resort presuppose the 
 tree, as men are descended from man, call him Adam or 
 Manu or any other name, many Purushas, from a meta- 
 physical point of view, necessitate the admission of one 
 Purusha, just as the many gods had to be recognised as in 
 reality the One God without a second, and at last as mere 
 mistakes of Brahman. In this way Vigwana-Bhikshu was 
 right that Kapila did not differ so much from Badarayawa 
 as it would seem, because, if the Purushas were supposed 
 to be many, they would not be Purushas, and being Purusha 
 they wouid by necessity cease to be many. It may be said 
 that this is going beyond Kapila, but surely we have a right 
 to do so. 
 
 It is necessary, at all events, that we should see all this 
 clearly, just as Vi(//?ana-Bhikshu and other philosophers 
 saw it clearly, in order to perceive the unity that underlies 
 the apparent diversity in the philosophy of India. Nor 
 
ATM AN AND URUSHA. 287 
 
 should we ever forget that our philosophical Sfttras, what- 
 ever their age, whether of. the fourteenth century A.D. or 
 4he fifth century B.C., are but the last outcome of the 
 philosophical activity of a whole country, and that we 
 are entirely ignorant of their historical antecedents. We 
 should remember that the grammatical Sutras of PaTiini 
 are* contradicted again and again by grammatical forms 
 which have fortunately been preserved to us in the earlier 
 Brahmainas and Mantras of the Vedic period. We have no 
 such remnants of an earlier period of philosophy anterior 
 to the Sutras, with the exception of the as yet unsystema- 
 tised Upanishads, and possibly of some of the more ancient 
 parts of the Mahabharata ; but in other respects we are 
 left without any earlier facts, though not without a firm 
 conviction that such perfect systems as we find in the 
 Sutras cannot have sprung up in a day, still less from one 
 brain, but that they must have passed through many 
 changes for better or for worse, before they could assume 
 that final and permanent form in which they are now pre- 
 sented to us in literature. The Sutras are, in fact, the final 
 outcome of ages of inquiry and discussion. 
 
 It would seem then to follow from Vi#/?ana-Bhikshu's 
 remarks, that in India a philosopher might at one and the 
 same time have been a follower of the Vedanta as well as 
 of the Samkhya, if he could only see that, where the two 
 follow different roads, they started nevertheless from the 
 same point and were proceeding towards the same goal. 
 If this is seen and accepted in a historical spirit, it can dq 
 no harm, though no doubt there is danger of the distinctive 
 features of each system becoming blurred, if we dwell too 
 much on what they share in common or on what they may 
 have shared in common at an earlier period of their 
 growth. In one respect Vi(//7ana-Bhikshu, to mention 
 him only, has certainly seen more rightly by not resorting 
 at once to the idea that actual borrowing must have taken 
 place, whenever Vedanta and S&mkhya shared the same 
 ideas. We should always remember that there must have 
 been a period of unrestricted growth of philosophical 
 thought in ancient India, and that during that period philo- 
 sophical ideas, whether true or false, were common property 
 
288 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 and could bo freely adopted by different schools of philo- 
 sophy. It was in the Stitras that these schools became 
 sterilised and petrified. 
 
 Cn one point Vi<7r/ana-Bhikshu may have gone too far, 
 yielding to a temptation which does not exist for us. To 
 him not only Vedanta and Samkhya, but all the six- 
 Darcanas or systems of philosophy were orthodox, they 
 were all Sm?^ti, though not $ruti. Hence his natural 
 desire to show that they did not on any essential points 
 contradict each other. After he had reconciled to his own 
 satisfaction the conflicting tenets of Vedanta and Samkhya, 
 and had certainly, at least to my mind, succeeded in dis- 
 covering the common background of both of them, he 
 attempted to do the same for the Nyaya and Vaiseshika, 
 These two, as he says, as they represent the Self as en- 
 dowed with qualities, might seem to be contradicted by 
 the Vedanta and Samkhya which show that the Self, or 
 the Purusha, cannot be endowed with qualities ; but this is 
 not so. Nyaya and Vaiseshika are intended, as he thinks, 
 as a first step only towards the truth ; and though they 
 admit the Self to be qualified by pain and joy, they teach 
 that the Self is at all events different from the body. This 
 is what marks the first advance toward a right under- 
 standing of the Self, not only as different from the body, 
 but as unaffected by pain and joy, as neither suffering nor 
 enjoying, as 'neither thinking nor acting in any way. To 
 the followers of the Nyaya-philosophy also, Brahman, the 
 Absolute, is Anirvafcamya, undefinable or inexpressible. 
 The full light, however, of the Samkhya-doctrine might 
 dazzle the beginner, and hence, according to Vigwana- 
 Bhikshu, the usefulness of the Nyaya and Vaiseshika, as 
 slowly preparing him for the acceptance of the highest 
 truth. There does not, however, seem to be any ancient 
 evidence to support this view of Vi^/^^na-Bhikshu's, that 
 the Nyaya and Vaiseshika were intended as a preparation 
 only, still less that they existed as systems before the 
 doctrines of the Samkhya began to influence the thinkers 
 of India. The Samkhya is indeed mentioned in the Maha- 
 bharata (XII, in, 98) as the highest truth, but the other 
 systems are never represented as merely preparations for 
 
THE SASTRA. 289 
 
 it. They present themselves as independent philosophies, 
 quite as much as the other Darsanas: nor do I remember 
 s any passage where Gotama and Kanada themselves repre- 
 sent their teaching as a mere step leading to the higher 
 knowledge of Vedanta or Samkhya, nor any utterance of 
 Badarayana or Kapila to the effect that such preparation 
 .was required. 
 
 Origin of Avidy&. 
 
 The question which the Samkhya may seem to have left 
 unanswered, but which is really unanswerable, is, How 
 this Aviveka, this failure of Purusha to recognise himself 
 as distinct from Prakr/ti, could ever have arisen, and how 
 and by what stages the development of Prakriti may be 
 supposed to have taken place which led in the end to the 
 delusion of Purusha and made him look on the senses, on 
 the Manas (central sense), on the Aham or ego, nay on 
 Buddhi or intellect, on everything, in fact, within his 
 experience, as belonging to him, as his own ? What Kapila 
 wishes to teach is that nothing is in reality his own or 
 belongs to him except his Self, or, as he calls it, the Purusha. 
 iHere we can observe a real difference between Samkhya 
 and Ved&nta. And while in all these discussions Badara- 
 yatia had only to appeal to the Veda in support of any one 
 iof his statements, Kapila, with all his regard for Aptava- 
 fcana, had evidently meant to reason out his system bj 
 himself, though without any declared antagonism to the 
 <;\^edas. Hence the Sutras of Kapila received the name of 
 Manana-sastra, institute of reasoned truth. 
 
 The /S&stra. 
 
 If then it is asked how Kapila came to know anything 
 about Prakr^ti or Ur staff which, as superintended by 
 Purusha, is said to stand for the whole of creation, and 
 how we ourselves can know anything about its various 
 developments, beginning with Buddhi or intellect, and 
 
 fing on from Buddhi to Ahamkara, the making of the 
 or Ego, or subjectivity as inseparable from objectivity, 
 and from Ahamkara to the Tanmatras or subtle substances, 
 &c., we have to confess with the author of the Samkhya- 
 
 19 U 
 
290 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 sara that there Was nothing but the Sastra itself to 
 depend on in support of what may be felt to be very crude 
 and startling assertions 1 . $astra sometimes stands for 
 Veda, but it cannot well be taken in that sense here. It 
 seems rather to point to the existence of a treatise, such as 
 the Sa?nkhya-karikli or the original text of the Samkhya- 
 Sutras, or the whole body of Samkhya-philosophy, as 
 handed down from time immemorial in various schools in 
 India. At first sight, ns doubt, it seems strange to us to 
 derive Buddhi or Intellect from Prakriti, nature, or from 
 Avyakta, the undeveloped. But we must remember that 
 all these English renderings are very imperfect. Prakriti 
 is very different from nature or 4>vcrty, though there is 
 hardly a more convenient term to render it by. In the 
 Samkhya-philosophy Prakriti is a postulated something 
 that exists, and that produces everything without being 
 itself produced. When it is called Avyakta, that means 
 that it is, at first, chaotic, undeveloped, and invisible. 
 
 Development of Prakrtti, Cosmic. 
 
 In place of this one Prakriti we often read of eight 
 Prakritis, those beginning with Buddhi or the Mahat 
 being distinguished as produced as well as producing, 
 while the first, the Avyakta, is producing only, but not 
 produced. This need not mean more than that ~the seven 
 modifications (Vikaras) and/orms of Prakriti are all effects, 
 and serve again as causes, while the Avyakta itself, the 
 undeveloped Prakriti, has no antecedent cause, but serves 
 as cause only for all the other forms of Prakriti. 
 
 Retrospect. 
 
 After going through the long list of topics wliich form 
 the elements of the Samkhya-philosophy, it may be well 
 to try to give a more general view of Kapila's system. 
 
 1 For the actual succession in the evolution of Ahnwkara from the 
 Mahat, and of the Mahat from Praknti, &c., the .Sastra alone, we are 
 told, can be our authority, and not inference, because inference can only 
 l*a<l us to the conclusion that all effects must have a cause, while there 
 is no inference to prove either the succession beginning with the 
 element*, or that beginning with the mind in the way in which the 
 toadies. Then what is meant by Sastra here ? 
 
RETROSPECT. 2QI 
 
 Whether we begin with the beginning, the postulated 
 Prakr/ti, or with the end, the phenomenal world as re- 
 flected by the Indriyas arid the Manas, it is but natural 
 that Kapila should have asked himself the question how 
 what was postulated as the beginning, the undeveloped 
 Prakriti, could account for all that was to follow, or how 
 ill that did follow could be traced back to this postulated 
 Prakriti. Given t 1 undeveloped Praknti, he imagined 
 that it was due to the? disturbance of the equilibrium of its 
 three constituents (Curias) that it was first awakened to 
 life and light or thought, to physical and intellectual 
 activity. Some such impulse is required by ail meta- 
 physicians, a Ttp&rov KWOVV. r This first step in the develop- 
 ment of Prakriti, this first awakening of the inert substance, 
 is conceived by Kapila as Buddhi, the lighting up, and 
 hence, so long as it is* confined to Prakriti, described as 
 Prakaga, or light, the chief condition of all perception. 
 After Praktvti has thus been lighted up and become Buddhi, 
 or potential perception, another distinction was necessary 
 in this luminous and perceiving mass, in this so-called 
 Mahat or Buddhi, namely, the differentiation between per- 
 ceiver and what is perceived, between subject and object. 
 This was the work assigned, J believe, to Ahamkara, 
 which I should prefer to translate by subjectivation (Sub- 
 jeciwirting, Garbe) rather than by Ego or 'Egoism. 
 
 This step from Buddhi to Ahamkara has been compared 
 to JDes Cartes' Oogito ergo sum \, but is it not rather Sum, 
 ergo cogito, as showing that being itself would be impos- 
 sible unless it were first lighted up, and differentiated into 
 subject and object ; that t-sse, in fact, is jwcipi, or evon 
 pemipere ? 
 
 When the evolution of the Avyakta has gone so far, the 
 question arises, how this process of perception could take 
 place, how perception is possible subjectively, how it is 
 possible objectively. If we begin with the objective side, 
 the answer of Xn^iid is thai- there must be Tamnatnis 
 (This-only), potential perceptib'dia, which are not the poten- 
 tialities of everything in general, but of this and this only 
 
 1 Davies, Hindu Philosophy, p. rS. 
 U 2 
 
2Q2 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 (Tan-matra). These five potentialities are Sound, Touch, 
 Odour, Light, and Taste. They are not yet what is actually 
 heard, seen, &c., nor what actually hears and sees, but thy 
 contain the possibilities of both. As there is no hearing 
 without sound, the Samkhyas seem to have argued, neither 
 is there any sound without hearing. But there is in the 
 Tanmatras the potentiality of both. Hence, according to 
 the division produced by Ahamkara into subject and object, 
 the five Tanmatras are realised as the five subjective 
 powers of perception, the powers of hearing, touching, 
 smelling, seeing, and tasting, and corresponding to them 
 as the five objects of sense, the objects of sound, touch, 
 odour, sight, and taste. In their final form the five potential 
 Tanmatras stand before us in their material shape, sub- 
 jectively as ear, skin, nose, eyes, and tongue, objectively as 
 ether, air, light, water, and earth (the lite Mahabhutas). 
 These five supply all possible and real fortos under which 
 perception can and does take place. 
 
 It should be remembered, however, that in order to 
 account for perception such as it really is, another, a sixth 
 sense, is necessary, in addition to the five, which is called 
 Manas, generally translated by mind, but really, a kind of 
 central organ of perception, acting as a door-keeper, meant 
 to prevent the crowding in of perecptic s, to arrange them 
 into percepts, and, as we should say, into concepts also, 
 being in fact the conditio sine qud nan of all well-ordered 
 and rational thought One might feel inclined to translate 
 Manas by brain, if brain had not become so unscientific 
 a term in our days. It might also be called the point of 
 attention and apperception, but even this would hardly 
 help us to a cltear view of what Kapila really meant by 
 Manas. Only we must guard against taking this Marias, 
 or mind, for the true Self. 'Manas is as much a mere 
 instrument of knowledge and a pfjduct of Prakwti as the 
 five senses. They all are necessary for the work of percep- 
 tion, conception, and all the rest, us a kind of clockwork, quite 
 different from the highest Self, whether it is called 
 Atman or Pnrusha. The Purusha watches the clockwork, 
 an-1 is for a time misled into believing in his identity with 
 the worki HITS of Prakr^ti. 
 
IS SLVKHYA IDEALISM 293 
 
 This is but a poor attempt to make the Samkhya view*, 
 of being and knowing intelligible, and I am far from main- 
 taining that we have gained, as yet, a full insight into the 
 problems which troubled Kapila, or into the solutions 
 which he proposed. What I feel is, that it is not enough 
 simply to repeat the watchwords of any ancient philosophy, 
 which are easily accessible in the Sutras, but that we must 
 at least make an attempt to bring those ancient problems 
 near to us, to make them our own, and try to follow the 
 ancient thinkers along the few footsteps which they left 
 behind. 
 
 There is an illustration in the Samkhya-tattva-Kaurnudi 
 36, which suggests a very different view of the process of 
 knowing, and deserves to be taken into consideration : ' As 
 the seniors of a village/ they say, * collect taxes from the 
 householders and hand them over to the governor of 
 the district, who again remits them to the treasurer, and 
 the treasurer to the king, thus do the outer senses, when 
 they have perceived anything, hand it on to the inner 
 sense, the Manas, the organ which determines what there 
 is and then hands it over to Ahamkara, and the Ahamkara, 
 after appropriating it, to the Buddhi, the supreme Lord.' 
 Here Buddhi, though supreme, is decidedly different from 
 the cosmic Buddhi that springs from the Avyakta and 
 leads to jihamkara ; nor is it easy to see how these two 
 Buddhis, or rather that one Buddhi in its two functions, 
 could have been admitted by one and the same philosopher. 
 
 In S&mkhya Idealism? 
 
 There is another point on which it ib difficult to come to 
 a clear understanding. We are asked whether the Hindus 
 fully realised the fact that we are conscious of our sensa- 
 tions only, arid that all we call bodies, or the outside or 
 objective world, is no more than the result of an irresistible 
 inference of our mind, which may be called Aviclya. We 
 are conscious, no doubt, that we are not ourselves the 
 cause of our sensations, that we do nt make the sky, but 
 that it is given us. But beyond that, our world is only an 
 inductive world, it is, so to say, our creation ; we make the 
 sky concave or blue, and all that remains, after deducting 
 
294 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY, 
 
 both the primary and secondary qualities, is Prakriti as 
 looked at by Purusha, or, as v. 3 should say, das Ding an 
 &ieh, which we can never know directly. It is within us, 
 or under our sway ; that this Prakrvti has grown to all that 
 it is, not excluding our own bodies, our senses, our Manas, 
 our Tanmatras, our Ahawkara, our Buddhi. Was this the 
 view ta\en by the Samkhyas? Did they see that the 
 San&ara, the development of the world, takes place within 
 us, is our* growth, though not our work, that the light 
 which, as Buddhi emerges from Prak?*iti, is the light 
 within us that has the power of perceiving by its light ; 
 that both* the Aham, the Ego. and the Tvam, the Non-Ego, 
 determine not only ourselves, but the whole world, and 
 that what we call the Teal, the sensuously perceiving and 
 perceived world, is no more than the development of 
 thoughtless nature as reflected through the senses on our 
 enchanted Self? The riddle of the world which the 
 Samkhya-philosophy has to solve would then be no more 
 than to account for the mistaken interest which the Self 
 takes in that reflex, the consciousness which he assumes of 
 it, the fundamental error by which, for a time at least, he 
 actually identifies himself with those images This identi- 
 fying process would, from , this point of view, really take 
 the place of what we call creation. The closing of the 
 mental eyelids would be the dropping of the curtain and 
 the close of the drama of the world ; and this final recogni- 
 tion of our cosmic misconception would lead the Self back 
 from the stage of the world to himself, would undo all 
 creation, and put an end to that suffering which is the 
 result of bondage or finiteness. 
 
 It sometimes seems to me as if such views had been at 
 the bottom of ail Hindu philosophy, though forgotten 
 again or obscured by a belief in that reality which deter- 
 mines our practical life ( VyavaMra). By admitting this 
 blending of cosmic and psychological views, much in the 
 Samkhya-philosophy would cease to be obscure, the Buddhi 
 of the world and the Buddhi of ourselves would indeed 
 become one, and the belief in the reality of things, both 
 objective and subjective, might truly be explained as due 
 to Aviveka, the absence of discrimination between the Self 
 
PUBUSHA AND P&A&2/II. ?95 
 
 and the imagery of nature. It would become intelligible 
 why Prakriti should be supposed to play her part so lo v fcg 
 Only as it was noticed by Purusha ; it would explain why 
 Prakriti, by itself, was taken as A&etana, objective, thought- 
 less, and the Purusha only as subjective, conscious and 
 thinking; why in its solitude Purusha was conceived as 
 not active, but Prakriti as always active; why Purusha 
 should sometimes mean the eternal Self, and sometimes 
 man such as he is or imagines himself to be, while in- 
 terested in the world, believing in the world, and yet with 
 a constant longing after a higher and truer state, freedom 
 from the world, freedom from pain, freedom from all cosmic 
 being, freedom as alone with himself. 
 
 and Prakrtti. 
 
 But if we may credit the founders of the Samkhya, 
 whether Kapila or Asuri or Pa//&asikha, with such ad- 
 vanced views, if they really had made it quite clear to 
 themselves that human beings cannot have anything but 
 their own knowledge, we can understand why they should 
 have represented the whole process of perception and com- 
 bination, all joy and pain, and, in consequence, all willing 
 also, as belonging, not to the Purusha or the Self, but to 
 a stranger, to the Manas, and indirectly to Prakriti, while 
 the Purusha, when he seems to see, to combine, to rejoice, 
 to suffer, and to will, does so by . misapprehension only, 
 like a spectator who is carried away by his sympathies for 
 Hecuba, but who in the end dries his tears and stops his 
 sighs, leaves the theatre of the world, and breathes the 
 fresh air of a bright night. The Samkhya uses this very 
 simile. The whole development of Prakriti, it is said, 
 takes place only when Purusha is looking on the dancer, 
 that is, on Prakr/ti, in. all her disguises. If he does not 
 look, she does not dance for him, and as soon as he turns 
 his eyes entirely away from her, she altogether ceases to 
 try to please him. She may please others who are still 
 looking at her, and so far it may be said that she is never 
 annihilated, because there will always be new Pumshas to 
 be enchanted and enchained for awhile, but at last to be 
 set free by her. 
 
296 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 State of Fnrusha, when Free. 
 
 Often has the question been asked, What then becomes of 
 the Purusha, after the spell of Prakriti has been broken, 
 and he has ceased to take any interest in the phantasma- 
 goria of the world, thrown on him by the Manas and all the 
 products of Prakriti that support the Manas. But this is a 
 question which no philosophy can be expected to answer. 
 All that can be said is that Purusha, freed from all 
 Prakntic bonds, whether ignorance or knowledge, joy or 
 sorrow, would remain himself, would be what he alone can 
 be, unrestricted, not interfered with, free and independent, 
 and hence, in the highest sense of the word, perfect and 
 happy in himself. This ineffable state of bliss has naturally 
 shared the fate of similar conceptions, such as the oneness 
 with Brahman, the NiAsreyaga or Non plus ultra, and the 
 Nirv&na of the Buddhists. In the eyes of less advanced 
 thinkers, this unfathomable bliss assumed naturally the 
 character of paradisiacal happiness painted in the most 
 brilliant and even sensuous colours, while to the truly 
 enlightened it represented tranquillity ($anti), perfect rest, 
 and self-satisfaction. While I agree with Dr. Dahlmann 1 
 that the Buddhist idea of NirvS/rca was the same, origin- 
 ally, as that of the higher bliss of the Ved&nta and Sam- 
 khya-philosophy, I cannot believe that it was borrowed by 
 the Buddhists from either of those systems. Nirvana was 
 one of the ideas that were in the air in India, and it was 
 worked out by Buddha as well as by Kapila and Badara- 
 yana, but by each in his own fashion. The name itself, 
 like many technical terms of Buddha's teaching, was no 
 doubt Brahmanic. It occurs in the Ved&nta, though it is 
 absent in the Samkhya-Sfttras. We see in the Buddhist 
 Suttas how it was used by the Buddhists, at first, in the 
 simple sense of freedom from passion, but was developed 
 higher and higher, till in the end it became altogether 
 negative. If it had been simply taken over by Buddha 
 from some individual teacher of an established philosophy,, 
 it would betray its origin, while we see it spring up as 
 
 1 Nirvana, eine Studie zur Vorgeschichte des Buddhismus von Joseph 
 Dahlmann, S.J. Berlin, 1896. 
 
MEANING OF PAIN. 297 
 
 naturally in Buddha's philosophy as in that of Badarayana 
 and Kapila. They all took their materials from the same 
 stratum of thought, and elaborated them into systems, 
 probably about the same time. But in spite of Dr. Dahl- 
 mann's very learned and very able pleading, I must say 
 once more that I cannot yet see any evidence for supposing 
 that either Buddha borrowed direct from Kapila or that 
 Kapila borrowed from Buddha. 
 
 Kapila does not enter into a minute analysis of his Nir- 
 vaTia, or, as he calls it. Kaivalya, aloneness. His object was 
 to show how pam arose and how pain can be absolutely 
 removed. If freedom from limitation and pain is happi- 
 ness, that happiness can be secured by the Samkhya just 
 as much as by the Vedanta and the Buddhist;philosophy J 
 but though the Vedantist admits happiness (Ananda) by 
 the side of existence and perception (SaWfcit), as peculiar 
 to the highest Brahman, he does not attempt to explain 
 what kind of happiness he means; and some Vedanta 
 philosophers have actually objected to Ananda or happi- 
 ness as a positive predicate of the .highest Brahman. 
 Negatively, however, this happiness may surely be defined 
 as freedom from pain, freedom from all limits or fetters, 
 and therefore perfect bliss. 
 
 Meaning of Pain. 
 
 It would seem extraordinary, and wholly unworthy of 
 a great philosopher, if Kapila had had eyes for the ordinary 
 sufferings only which are entailed 011 all the sons of men. 
 He must have known that there is happiness also for them, 
 and something between suffering and happiness, the even 
 tenour of a man's life. Kapila meant something else by 
 pain. He seems to have felt what Schelling felt, that sad- 
 ness cleaves to all finite life, but that is very different from 
 always being intent on getting rid of the sufferings inherent 
 -in life on earth. Kapila evidently meant by Du/^kha or 
 pain something more than physical or even mental suffer- 
 ing, namely the consciousness of being conditioned, limited, 
 or fettered, which is inseparable from this life. But what- 
 ever suffering he may have meant, the method suggested 
 by him for its removal is certainly bold and decided. All 
 
298 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 this suffering, he tells us, is not, as we imagine, our suffer- 
 ing. Like the whole evolution of Prakriti, this suffering 
 also belongs to Prakriti and not to ourselves, not to the. 
 Purushas. 
 
 Punisha. 
 
 In order to explain the world, we have to admit not only 
 Prakriti, rising in the form of Buddhi, Ahamkara, and 
 Manas to the height or the depth of individual existence, 
 perception, and action, but likewise another quite indepen- 
 dent being, the Purusha, the real or the better and truer 
 Self, and therefore very much the A same as the Atman of 
 the Vedanta. Both Purusha and Atman, it should be re- 
 membered, are absent in Buddha's teaching, and by their 
 removal the idea of Nirvana has become almost meaning- 
 less. But on this point also we must wait for further 
 light. 
 
 With Kapila the Purusha or Self always remains, after 
 as well as before his release. It is true he is only the 
 looker on of all that takes place through Prakriti, looking 
 as it were into a glass m which all the doings of Prakriti 
 are mirrored. For a time by some strange want of discern- 
 ment, this Purusha, always one of many Purushas, forgets 
 his true nature and identifies himself with this image of 
 Prakriti. He imagines therefore that he himself ees and 
 hears, that he himself suffers and rejoices, that he himself 
 is an I, really possessing all that the world offers to him, 
 and unwilling to give it up again, whether in life or in 
 death. His very body, however, his organs of sense, nay 
 his mind and his individuality, are neither he, nor his ; and 
 if he can only learn the wisdom of Kapila, he is for ever 
 above the body, above all sensation, above all suffering. 
 Nay Prakriti even, which has no soul, but acts only as im- 
 pelled by her nature when looked at by Purusha, ceases her 
 jugglery as soon as Purusha turns away. 
 
 Prakrit! an Automaton? 
 
 It might possibly help us to understand the relation be- 
 tween Purusha and Prakriti better, if we saw in Prakriii 
 an automaton, such as Des Cartes described, performing all 
 
PRAKff/TlS UNSELFISHNESS. 2Q9 
 
 the functions which we consider our own and which are 
 common to man and animals, as in fact a mere mechanism, 
 and if we took the rational soul, the Purusha, as the chose 
 pensante, superadded to the automaton. It was Professor 
 Huxley who showed that, as a consequence of this assump- 
 tion, all our mental conditions might be regarded as simply 
 the symbols (Pratibimba) in consciousness of the changes 
 which take place automatically in the organism. In the 
 same way all the changes of Prakriti, from mere sensation 
 to conceptual thought, might be taken as including pain 
 and joy arid consequent action, the working of Prakriti, 
 independent of the looker on, although that looker on in 
 his enchanted state imagines that he is himself doing what 
 in reality Prakriti is doing for him. This is beautifully 
 illustrated by tha simile of the dancing-girl to which we 
 referred before, but who is here represented not only as 
 intent on pleasing and beguiling Purusha, but as trying 
 herself to open his eyes and make him free from her charms 
 and fetters. We thus get a new application of the simile 
 mentioned before. 
 
 Prakrit!'* Unselfishness. 
 
 We read in the Karikiis 59-62 : 4 As a dancer having 
 exhibited herself on the stage ceases to dance, so does 
 Nature (Prakr/ti) cease, when she has made herself mani- 
 fest to Purusha. 
 
 fo. In many ways Prakr^ti serves Purusha, who yet 
 does nothing for her in return ; she is noble minded and 
 cares only for the welfare of him who is so ungrateful 
 to her. 
 
 61. There is nothing more modest, I think, than Prakriti, 
 who does not expose herself again to the gaze of Purusha 
 after she knows that she has been gazed at. 
 
 62. No Purusha- is therefore really chained, nor does he 
 become free, or wander ; Prakrit! alone, dependent as she 
 is on different Purushas, wanders from birth to birth, is 
 bound, and is freed/ 
 
 In fact it would "seem that Prakriti, in enchanting or 
 binding Purusha, has no o'bject in view except that Purusha 
 
3OO INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 should in the end perceive his fetters, and by discrimination 
 become free from them (Karika 59). 
 
 Here is indeed the Gordian knot of the whole Sa?)ikhya- 
 philosophy. We believe for a time in our own physical 
 nature and in the nature by which we are surrounded, and 
 so long as we do this, we suffer. We are exposed to all 
 kinds of pain, till our eyes are opened and we learn that 
 it is Prak?*iti that sees and acts, that kills and is killed, 
 that suffers, while we imagine that we ourselves do and 
 suffer all this. As soon as this insight has been gained, as 
 soon as Purusha has distinguished between himself and what 
 is not himself, liberation is achieved at once, and the dance 
 of life is ended for ever, at least so far as the liberated Self 
 is concerned. Until that final liberation has been accom- 
 plished and everything like body has been completely re- 
 moved, transmigration continues, and the Purusha is sup- 
 posed to be clothed in what is called the Linga-sarira, or 
 subtle body. Whatever we may think of the truth of such 
 a system we cannot help admiring its consistency through- 
 out, and its boldness and heroism in cutting the GOrdian 
 knot. 
 
 Gross and Subtle Body. 
 
 The idea of a subtle body by the side of our gross body 
 is very natural ; and we know that among the Greeks also 
 Pythagoras claimed a subtle ethereal clothing for the soul 
 apart from its grosser clothing when united with the body. 
 But the exact nature of that subtle body and its relation to 
 the grosser body is by no means as clear as we could wish 
 it to be. 
 
 Both Samkhyas and Vedantists agreed in admitting the 
 necessity of a subtle body in order to make the process of 
 migration after death intclligible. A In the Vedanta the 
 name of that body, or vehicle, or Aoraya for the journey 
 of the soul from existence to existence is Sftkshma-garira, 
 the subtle body. The Vedantists look upon this thin and 
 transparent vehicle of the soul as a seminal or potential 
 (Vi#a or $akti) body, which at death leaves the coarse 
 material body, without being injured itself. This subtle 
 body arises, according to the Vedanta, from the so-called 
 Upadhis (conditions), and consists of the senses of the body 
 
GROSS AND SUBTLE BODY. 3OI 
 
 (Dehendriyas), both perceptive (Buddhlndriyas) and active 
 (Karmendriyas), and of Manas (mind), of Buddhi (intellect), 
 Vedaiia (sensation), implying beyond icself the vishayas, 
 objects required for sensation and presupposed already by 
 Manas. Its physical life is dependent on the Mukhya 
 Pra/fta, the vital spirit, and on the five Pra?ias, the special- 
 ised spirits. Its Indriyas or senses are not to be taken as 
 the external organs of sense, such as ears, eyes, &c., but as 
 their functions only (Vritti). This subtle and invisible body 
 or Sukshma-sarira remains, according to the Vedanta, till 
 true knowledge arises, and the individual soul recovers its . 
 true being in Brahman. The Vedantists are, however, by 
 no means consistent in their views on these two bodies, the 
 subtle and the coarse body (Sukshmam and Sthulam $ari- 
 ram), or on the process by which the one affects or controls 
 the other. At the final dissolution of the coarse body we 
 are told that the Indriyas are absorbed in the Manas, the 
 Manas in the Mukhya Pra/na, this in the Giva, the indivi- 
 dual, and this in the subtle body ; but neithei the Upani- 
 shads nor the Vedanta-Sutras are always quite consistent 
 and clear in their views on the subject, and it seems to me 
 useless to attempt to reduce their various guesses to one 
 uniform theory. 
 
 In the Samkhya-philosophy this Sukshma-sarira appears 
 as Linga-sarira, or the sign-body. The Sthula-sarira or 
 coarse material body consists, according to some Samkhya 
 teachers, of the five or four coarse elements (Bhutas), ac- 
 cording to others of the element of the earth only, and is 
 made up of six coverings, hair, blood, flesh, sinews, bones 
 and marrow. The subtle or inner body, sometimes called 
 the vehicle, or the Ativahika-sarira, is formed of eighteen 
 elements 1 , of (i) Buddhi, (2) Ahamkara, (3) Manas, (4-8) 
 the five Tanmatras or Sukshma-bhutas. and (9-18) the ten 
 senses. This body is of course invisible, but without it the 
 coarse body would be useless. It forms what we should 
 call our personality, and causes the difference in the char- 
 
 1 Karika 40, and Suwkhya-Sutras III, 9. Why tho Linga-sarira should 
 be said to consist of seventeen and one (Saptadasaikam) elements, is 
 difficult to say, unless Eka is taken for the Purusha who, for the time 
 being, identifies himself with the subtle body. 
 
3O2 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 acters of individuals, being itself what it has been made to 
 be by former works. All fitness for reward and punish- 
 ment attaches to it, not to the Purushas who are all alike 
 and unchanging, and it likewise determines by means of 
 its acquired dispositions the gross bodies into which it has 
 to enter from life to life, till final freedom is obtained by 
 the Purusha : and not only the gross body, but the subtle 
 body also is reabsorbed in Prak?**ti. 
 
 The Atheism of Kapila. 
 
 We have still to say a few words about the charge of 
 atheism brought against the Samkhyas. It seems certainly 
 strange that at this early time and surrounde^ as he no 
 doubt was by sacrifices and hymns addressed to the in- 
 numerable Vedic Devas, nothing should have been said by 
 Kapila either for or against these beings. Most lively at 
 his time and before his time, the different Devas of the 
 popular religion had already been eclipsed in the minds 
 of thoughtful people by one Deity, whether Prapapati, 
 Visvakarman, or Brahman. Both Pra^apati and Brahma 
 are mentioned in the Tattva saniltsia-Dhashya. But even 
 such a supreme Deva or Adhideva is never asserted or 
 denied by Kapila. There is a place in his system for any 
 number of subordinate Devas, but there is none for God, 
 whether as the creator or as the ruler of all things." There 
 is no direct denial of such a being, no out-spoken atheism 
 in that sense, but there is simply no place left for him in 
 tho system of the world, as elaborated by the old philo- 
 sopher. He had, in fact, put nearly everything that be- 
 longed to God into Prakriti, only that this Prakrit! is taken 
 as purely objective, and as working without a conscious 
 purpose, unless when looked at by Purusha, and then 
 working, as we are told, for his benefit only. 
 
 This has sometimes boon illustrated by what must have 
 been a very old fable, viz. that of a cripple who could not 
 walk, meeting another cripple who could not see. As they 
 could not live by themselves, they lived together, the lame 
 one mounting on the shoulders of the blind one. Prakr/ti, 
 we are told, was the blind, Pvmisha the hune traveller. 
 
 We must remember, however, thftt Prakr/ti, though blind. 
 
THE ATHEISM OF KAPILA. 303 
 
 is always conceived as real, becau.se the Samkhya-philosophy 
 looks upon everything that is, as proceeding out of some- 
 thing that is real (Satkaryavada). And here we see again, 
 the fundamental difference between the Samkhya and the 
 other philosophies, as Vafcaspati-Misra has pointed out in 
 his commentary on the Samkhya-karikA 9. The Buddhist 
 takes the real world as the result of nothing, the Vedantist 
 takes the unreal world as proceeding from something real, 
 Naiy&yika and Vaiseshika derive what does not yet exist 
 from what does exist, while the Samkhyas derive what is 
 from what is 1 . 
 
 If it be asked how the unconscious Prakr?'ti began to , 
 work and attract the attention of Purusha, Kapila has an 
 answer ready. The Gu/ias, he says, are first in a state of 
 equipoise, but as soon as one of the three preponderates, 
 there is tension, and Prakriti enters on the course of her 
 unceasing labours, beginning with the emanation of Buddhi, 
 and ending with the last of the twenty-four Tattvas. 
 
 There is this diifereuee also between the atheism of 
 Kapiia and that of other atheistic systems of philosophy, 
 that Kapila nowhere puts himself into a hostile attitude 
 towards the Divine idea. He nowhere denies distinctly the 
 existence even of the purely mythological gods, such as 
 Indra, which is strange indeed ; nor does he enter on any 
 arguments to disprove the existence of one only God. He 
 simply says and in that respect he does not differ much 
 from Kant that there are no logical proofs to establish 
 that existence, but neither does he offer any such proofs 
 for denying it. Wo know that Kant, honest thinker as he 
 was, rejected all the logical proofs of the existence of Deity 
 as insufficient, and based the arguments for his belief in 
 God on purely ethical grounds. .Though we have no right 
 to assume anything of the kind with regard to Kapila, 
 when brought face to face with this great religious and 
 moral problem, the existence of a supreme God, we ought 
 to mark his impartiality and the entire absence, in the 
 whole of his philosophy, of anything like animus against 
 a belief in God. The Devas he could hardly have seriously 
 
 1 Uarbe. Sawkhya-PbilosopJiie, p 202. 
 
304 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 believed in, we should say, and yet he spares them and 
 allows them to exist, possibly with the reservation that 
 people, in worshipping them, were unconsciously approach 5 
 ing the true Purusha. We should not forget that with 
 many people atheism meant, and means, a denial of Devas 
 rather than the denial of the one, only God, the First 
 Cause of the world. This whole question, however, will 
 be better discussed when we reach the Yoga-philosophy 
 and have to Examine the arguments produced by Pata%ali 
 against Kapila, and in support of the admission of a Su- 
 preme Being, generally called fsvara, the Lord, 
 
 Immorality of the Samkliya. 
 
 It has also been said that Kapila's system is not only 
 without a God, but likewise without any morality. But 
 though it is quite true that, according to Kaj ila, Purusha 
 in his perfect state is non-moral, neither merit nor demerit, 
 virtue nor vice, existing any longer for him, he is certainly 
 not allowed to be immoral. The Samkhya, like the Vcdanta 
 and other systems of Indian philosophy, implies strong 
 moral sentiment in the belief in Karman (deed) and trans- 
 migration. Kapila also holds that deeds, when once done, 
 can never cease, except at the time of Moksha, but produce 
 effect after effect, both in this life and in the lives to come. 
 This is one of the unalterable convictions in the Hindu 
 mind. There is, besides the admission of virtue and vice, 
 the dispraise of passion and the praise of tlispassion. These 
 are represented as forms of Buddhi, as Rupas or Bhavas, 
 forms or states, inhering in Buddhi. and therefore following 
 the Linga-sarira from birth to birth. Nay, it is distinctly 
 added that going upward is due to virtue, going downward 
 to vice, so that virtue, as a preliminary, is really indis- 
 pensable to final liberation. It may be true that in this 
 way morality is reduced to mere calculation of consequences, 
 but even such a calculation, which is only another name 
 for reasoning, would serve as a strong incentive to morality. 
 Anyhow there is no ground for saying that Kapila's system 
 ignores ordinary morality, still less that it encourages 
 vice. 
 
SAJI/KHYA PARABLES. 365 
 
 S&mkhya Parables. 
 
 There is one more feature of the Samkhya that deserves 
 to be mentioned, because it is not found in the other Indian 
 philosophies, but may be supposed to have suggested to 
 the Buddhists their method of teaching by parables. 
 A whole chapter of the Sutras, the fourth, is assigned to 
 a collection of stories, each of which is meant to illustrate 
 some doctrine of Kapila's. Some are very much to the 
 point, and they can be appealed to by one word, so as to 
 recall the whole lesson which they were meant to teach. 
 The first is meant to illustrate the complete change that 
 comes over a man when he has been taught his true nature 
 by means of the Samkhya. * As in the case of the. son of 
 a king/ The story which follows is that a young prince 
 who was born under an unlucky star, was taken out of his 
 capital and brought up by a $abara, a kind of wild man 
 of the woods. When he grew up he naturally thought 
 that he himself was a /Sabara, and lived accordingly. But 
 a minister, who had found out that the prince was alive, 
 went to him secretly and told him that he was the son of 
 the king, and not a /Sabara. At once the prince gave up 
 the idea that he was a savage, believed that he was a 
 prince, and assumed a truly royal bearing. In the same 
 manner ar man who has been told his true character by his 
 teacher, surrenders the idea that he is a material and mortal 
 Ueing, and recovers his true nature, saying ' As a son of 
 Brahman I am nothing but Brahman, and not a being 
 different from him in this phenomenal world.' 
 
 The commentator adds an extract from the Garuo?a- 
 Purlbia which must have been borrowed from a Samkhya 
 source : 
 
 ' As everything that is made of gold is known as gold, if 
 even from one small piece of gold one has learnt to know 
 what gold is, in the same way from knowing God the whole 
 world becomes known, 
 
 As a Brahman possessed by an evil spirit, imagines that 
 he is a $ftdra, but, when the possession is over, 'knows 
 that he is a Br&hman, thus the soul, pqssessed by M&ya, 
 imagines that it is the body, but after Maya has come to 
 
 20 ~* 
 
306 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 an end, it knows its own true being again, and says, I am 
 a Brahman.' 
 
 The seventh illustration is ' like a cut-off hand/ and is 
 meant to teach that, as no one takes his hand again after 
 it has once been cut off. no one should identify himself with 
 anything objective, after having once surrendered the illu- 
 sion of the objective. The sixteenth, to which I called 
 attention many years ago as connected with old Aryan 
 folklore, is meant to teach that even an accidental negli- 
 gence may be fatal to our reaching the highest goal, as in 
 the case of the ' frog- wife/ 
 
 The story is that of a king who, while hunting, had seen 
 a beautiful girl in a forest. She became his wife on condi- 
 tion that he should never let her see water. He gave the 
 promise, but once when the queen, tired after playing, 
 asked him for some water, he forgot his promise, and 
 brought her some, whereupon the daughter of the frog- 
 king became a frog (Bheki), and disappeared in the lake. 
 Neither. nets nor anything else was of any avail for bringing 
 her back, the king had lost her for ever. Thus true know- 
 ledge also will disappear by one act of negligence, and will 
 never return. 
 
 This system of teaching by parables was very popular 
 with the Buddhists, arid it is just possible that the first 
 impulse may have come from the followers of Kapila, who 
 are so often called Krypto-buddhists or Pra/cAAamia- 
 Bauddhas. 
 
 I have called attention already to the fact that these 
 illustrative parables, though they do not occur in the 
 Karikas and in the Tattva-samasa, must have existed al, T 
 the time in the Parampara of the Brahmans, because they 
 appear in the modern Sutras, tha.t is in the sixteenth 
 century. Like the Sfttras referring to these stories, other 
 Sfttras also may occur in our modern collection of Samkhya- 
 Sutras, which existed for centuries, as handed down by 
 tradition, but were omitted in the Karikas and even in the 
 Tattva-samasa. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 Yoga and S&mkhya. 
 
 THE relation of the Yo .a to the Sawkhya-philosophy is 
 not easy to determine, bin the Bhagavad-gita V, 4, goes so 
 far as to say that children only, not learned people, distin- 
 guish between Samkhya and Yoga at all, as it were between 
 faith (knowledge) and works. We find the Samkhya and 
 Yoga represented, each in its own Sutras, which are Ascribed 
 to different authors, Kapila and Pata//$ali J , and they are 
 spoken of in the dual as the two old systems (Mahabh. XII, 
 104, 67) ; but we also find a philosophy called Sawkbya- 
 yoga (Svetasv. Up. II, 13), and this not as a Dvandva, as it 
 were, Samkhya and Yoga, but as cne philosophy, as a 
 neuter sing., representing Yoga and Samkhya together as 
 one, or possibly as Yoga belonging to the Samkhya. Thus 
 we read again in the Bhagavad-gita V, 5, that he who 
 understands Samkhya and Yoga to be one, understands 
 aright. Yoga, in the sense of ascetic practices and medita- 
 tions, may 110 doubt have existed in India in very ancient 
 times. It is called Puratana (old), (B. G. IV, 3), and tliis is 
 probably what the author of the Bhagavad-gita (IV, i), 
 meant, when he made the Bhagavat say to Arc/una: 
 
 ' I declared this imperishable Yoga to Vivas vat, Vivasvat 
 told it to Maim, Manu to Ikshvaku. Thus royal sages 
 came to know it, having received it through tradition; but 
 this Yoga was lost here by long lapse of time/ 
 
 A similar oral tradition descending from Pra^apati to 
 Manu, and from Maim to the people (to Ikshvf.ku, accord - 
 
 1 The identification of these two names with the name of one person 
 Kapya Pataftfc&la, who is mentioned in the Satapatba-briVlimana, once 
 proposed by Professor Weber, has probably long been given up by >rn. 
 See also Garbe, S&mkhya- Philosophic, p. 26. 
 
 X 2 
 
308 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 ing to $awkara) is mentioned already in the -KMndogya 
 Upanishad (III, u ; VIII, 15). 
 
 It is much the same with the other philosophies, and w$ 
 are left in doubt a? to whether the three couples, Samkhya 
 and Yoga, Nyaya and Vaiseshika, nay even Pftrva- and 
 Uttara-Mima?nsa, were amalgamations of systems which 
 had originally an independent existence, or whether they 
 were differentiations of former systems. Samkhya and 
 Yoga might easily have formed one comprehensive system, 
 because their divergence with regard to the existence of an 
 Isvara, or Lord, was not so essential a point to them as it 
 seems to us. Those who wanted an Isvara might have him 
 as a first and super- eminent Purusha ; while those who had 
 gone beyond this want, need not have quarrelled with 
 those who still felt it. The Nyaya and Vaiseshika show 
 clear traces of a common origin ; while the two Miinamsas, 
 which in character are more remote from one another than 
 the other systems, seem to sanction, by their names at least, 
 the suspicion of their former unity. But the deplorable 
 scarcity of any historical documents does not enable us 
 to go beyond mere conjectures ; and though the names of 
 Kapila, Vyasa, and Gotama may seenr to have an older air 
 than those of Pata>7<7ali, Craimini, and Kanada, \ve must 
 not in such matters allow ourselves to be guided by mere 
 impressions. The often-cited passage from the Vedanta- 
 Siitras II, i, 3, Etena Yoga/* pratyuktafc, 'By this the Yoga 
 is refuted/ proves of coiirse no more than the existence of 
 a Yoo-a-philosophy at the time of BadarayaTia ; it cannot be 
 used to prove the existence of the Yoga-Sfttras, such as we 
 pusses them, as previous to the composition of the Vedanta- 
 Sutras. 
 
 SAtfaninffs of the word Toga. 
 
 In the Bhagavad-gita Yoga is defined as S'amatva, equa- 
 bility (II, 48 v . It has been repeated again and again that 
 Yoga, I: win Yu#, to join, meant 'originally joining the deity, 
 or union with it. Even native authors occasionally tavour 
 that view. A moment's consideration, however, would 
 have shown that such an idea could never have entered the 
 mind of a Sarokhya, for the simple reason that there was 
 
YOGA, NOT UNION, BUT DISUNION, 309 
 
 nothing for him that he could have wished to join. Even 
 the Vedantist does not really join Brahman, though this is 
 j, very common misconception; nay, a movement of the 
 soul towards Brahman is distinctly guarded against as 
 impossible. The soul is always Brahman, even though it 
 does not know it, and it only requires the removal of 
 ignorance for the soul to recover its Brahmahood, or to* 
 become what it always has been. Yu<7, from meaning to 
 join, came, by means of a very old metaphor, to mean to 
 join oneself to something, to harness oneself for some work. 
 Thus Yu# assumed the sense of preparing for hard work, 
 whether preparing others or getting ready oneself. 1 And 
 as people with us use the expression to go into harness, i.e. 
 to prepare for work, or to buckle-to, jL e. to get ready for 
 hard work, Yugr, particularly in the Atrnanepada, came to 
 mean to exert oneself. Possibly the German Angespannt 
 and Anspannung may have been suggested by the same 
 metaphor, though the usual explanation is that it was 
 suggested by a metaphor taken from the stretching of the 
 bow. In Sanskrit ^this Yu# is often used with such words 
 as Manas, jfiTittam, Atman, &c., in the sense of concentrating 
 or exerting one's mind ; and it is in this sense only that our 
 word Yoga could have sprung from it, meaning, a*? the 
 Yoga-Sutras tell us at the very beginning, I, 2, the effort 
 of restraining the activities or distractions of our thoughts 
 (Jfitta-v?*itti-nirodha), or the effort of concentrating our 
 thoughts on a definite object. 
 
 Yoga, not Union, but Disunion. 
 
 A false interpretation of the term Yoga as union has led 
 to a total misrepresentation of Pata</ali's philosophy. 
 Rajendralal Mitra, p. 308, was therefore quite right when 
 he wrote : * Professor Weber, in his History of Indian 
 Literature (pp. 238-9), has entirely misrepresented the case- 
 He says, * One very peculiar side of the Yoga doctrine 
 and one which was more and more developed as time went 
 on is the Yoga practice, that is, the outward means, such 
 as penances, mortifications, and the like, whereby this 
 absorption into the supreme Godhead is sought to be 
 
310 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 attained." " The idea of absorption," he continues rightly, 
 'into the supreme Godhead forms no part of the Yoga 
 theory." " Patay7(/ali, like Kapila," he adds, " rests satisfied 
 with the isolation of the soul, and does not pry into the 
 how and where the soul abides after separation."' But 
 when he charges the professor with not having read the 
 Yoga he goes a little too far, and he ought to have known, 
 from his own experience, that it is small blame to a man 
 who writes a complete history of Indian literature, if he 
 has not read every book on which he has to pronounce an 
 opinion. Even the best historian of German literature can 
 hardly have read every German author of any eminence, 
 much less can the first hivstorian of Sanskrit literature. 
 
 Rajendralal Mitra, however, is quite right so far that 
 Yoga, in the philosophy of Pataugrali and Kapila, did not 
 mean union with God. or anything but effort (Udyoga, not 
 Sar/iyoga), pulling oneself together, exertion, concentration. 
 Yoga might mean union, but the proper term would have 
 been Samyoga. Thus we read in the Bhagavad-gita II, 
 
 5 :- 
 
 Buddhiyukto grahatiha ubhe sukritadushkrite, 
 Tasmad yogaya yiK/yasva, yogaA karmasu kau.salam. 
 'He who is devoted to knowledge leaves behind loth good 
 and evil deeds ; therefore devote yourself to Yoga, Yoga is 
 success in (all) actions/ 
 
 That native scholars were well aware of the double 
 meaning of Yoga, we may see from a verse in the beginning 
 of Bhogradeva's commentary on the Yoga-Sutras, where he 
 states that, with a v true Yogin, Yoga, joining, means really 
 Viyoga, separation, or Viveka, discrimination between 
 Purusha arid PrakHti, subject and object, self and nature, 
 such as it is taught in the Samkhya: Pumprakrityor 
 viyogo*pi yoga ityudito yaya, 'By which (teaching of 
 Pata/7#ali) Yoga (union) is said to be Viyoga (separation) of 
 Purusha and Prakriii.' 
 
 Toga us Viveka. 
 
 We saw that this Viyoga or Viveka was indeed the 
 highest point to which the whole of the Samkhya* philosophy 
 
YOGA AS VIVEKA. 311 
 
 leads up. But granted that this discrimination, this sub- 
 duing and drawing away of the Self from all that is not 
 Self, is the highest object of philosophy, how is it to be 
 reached, and even when reached, how is it to be maintained ? 
 By knowledge chiefly, would be the answer of Kapila (by 
 6r>?anayoga) ; by ascetic exercises delivering the Self from 
 the fetters of the body arid the bodily senses, (by Kar ; 
 mayoga) adds Pata/?<?ali. Pata/?(/ali by no means ignores 
 the (?>7anayoga of Kapila. On the contrary, he presup- 
 poses it; he only adds, as a useful support, a number of 
 exercises, bodily as well as mental, by which the senses 
 should be kept in subjection so as not to interfere again 
 with the concentration of all thoughts on the Self or the 
 Purusha 1 . In that sense he tells us in the second Sutra that 
 Yoga is the effort of restraining the activity or distractions 
 of our thoughts. Before we begin to scoff at the Yoga and 
 its minute treatment of postures, breathings, arid other 
 means of mental concentration, we ought first of all to try 
 to understand their original intention. Everything can 
 become absurd by exaggeration, and this has been, no doubt, 
 the case with the self-imposed discipline and tortures of the 
 Yogins. But originally their object seems to have been 
 no other than to counteract the distractions of the senses. 
 We all consider the closing of the eyelids and the stopping 
 of the ^ears against disturbing noises useful for serious 
 meditation. This was the simple beginning of Yoga, and 
 in that sense it was meant to be a useful addition to the 
 Samkhya, because even a convinced Samkhya philosopher 
 who had obtained 6V7anayoga or knowledge-yoga would 
 inevitably suffer from the disturbances caused by external 
 circumstances and the continual inroads of the outer world 
 upon him, i.e. upon his Manas, unless strengthened to 
 resist by Karmayoga or work -yoga the ever present enemy 
 of his peace of mind. More minute directions as to how 
 this desired concentration and abstraction could be achieved 
 and maintained, might at first have been quite harmless, 
 
 1 I prefer, even in the Snmkhya-philosophy, to render Purusha by 
 Self rather than by man, because in English r nan cannot be used in the 
 sense of simply subject or* soul. Besidkes, Atwan, Self, is often used by 
 Palawan" himself for Purusha, cf. Yoga-Sutras III, ai ; II, 41. 
 
312 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY, 
 
 but if carried too. far they would inevitably produce those 
 torturing exercises which seemed to Buddha, as they do to 
 most people, so utterly foolish and useless. But if we our* 
 selves must admit that our senses and all that they imply 
 are real obstacles to quiet meditation, the attempts to reduce 
 these sensuous affections to some kind of quietude or equa- 
 bility (Samatva) need not surprise us, nor need we be 
 altogether incredulous as to the marvellous results obtained 
 by means of ascetic exercises by Yogins in India, as little 
 as we should treat the visions of St. Francis or St. Teresa 
 as downright impositions. The real relation of the soul 
 to the body and of the senses to the soul is still as great 
 a mystery to us as it was to the ancient Yogins of India, 
 and their experiences, if only honestly related, deserve 
 certainly the same careful attention as the stigmata of 
 Roman Catholic saints. They may be or they may not 
 be true, but there is no reason why they should be treated 
 as a priori untrue. From this point of view it seems to 
 me that the Yoga-philosophy deserves some attention on 
 the part of philosophers, more particularly of the physical 
 school 6f psychologists, and I did not feel justified there- 
 fore in passing over this system altogether, though it 
 may be quite true that, after we have once understood the 
 position of the Samkhya-philosophy towards the great 
 problem of the world, we shall not glean many new meta- 
 physical or psychological ideas from a study of the Yoga. 
 We must never forget that, although our Samkhya-Sfttras 
 are very modern, the Samkhya as such, is not, and is 
 always presupposed >by the Yoga. It has its roots in a soil 
 carefully prepared by centuries of philosophical cultivation, 
 and has but little in common with the orgiastic ecstasies 
 which we see among savage tribes of the present day. The 
 Hindus also, before they became civilised and philosophers, 
 may or may not have passed through such a phase. But 
 how little of true similarity there really exists between the 
 Yoga and Tapas of the Hindus, and the sweating processes 
 of the American Indians in their steam-booths, may easily 
 be seen from the excellent Reports of the Bureau of Eth- 
 nology, by J. W. Powell, 1892-3, p. 1 17 seq.; p. 823 seq., to 
 mention no other .and more painful reports. 
 
PATA^C?ALI, VYASA. 313 
 
 Before we enter upon an examination of the peculiar 
 teaching of the Yoga-philosophy, a few words with refer- 
 ence to the sources on which we have to depend for our 
 information may be useful. 
 
 Pata%ali, Vyasa. 
 
 The Stitras of the Yoga-philosophy are ascribed to Pata/7- 
 grali, who is also called Phanin or &esha, th /Hi vine serpent. 
 He may have been the author or the representative of the 
 Yoga-philosophy without being necessarily the author of 
 the Sfrtras. His date is of course uncertain, though some 
 scholars have, with great assurance, assigned him to thjs 
 second century B. c. It may be so, but we should say no 
 more. Even the commonly received identification of the 
 philosopher Pataw^ali with Pata/7(/ali, the grammarian and 
 author of the Mahabhashya, should be treated as yet as 
 a hypothesis only. We know too little about the history 
 of Sanskrit proper names to be able to say whether the 
 same Jiame implies the same person. That is not the case 
 in any other country, and can hardly be true in India 
 considering how freely the names of the gods or of great 
 Rishis were taken, and are still taken, as proper names. 
 It has actually been asserted that Vyasa, the author of a 
 late commentary on Pata%ali's Yoga-Sfttras, is the same 
 person as Vysa, the collector of the Vedas, the reputed 
 author of the Mah&bharata and of the Vedanta-Sfttras. 
 But there are ever so many Vyasas living even now, and 
 no solid argument could possibly be derived from the mere 
 recurrence of such a name. There are works ascribed to 
 Hirawyagarbha, Harihara, Vishnu, &c.; then why not to 
 Pata/7(/ali ? It is of course as impossible to prove that Pataw- 
 </ali the philosopher and Pata/^ali the grammarian were 
 not the same person, as to prove that they were ; but if 
 style of language and style of thought are any safe guides 
 in such matters, we ought certainly to hesitate, and should 
 do so in any other literature, before taking the grammarian 
 and the philosopher Pata//<yali as one and the same person. 
 It would no doubt be a great help if we could transfer the 
 date of the grammarian, the second century B.C., to the 
 
314 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 author of our Yoga-Siltras, but on that point also it seems 
 to me better to wait till we get some more tangible proof. 
 In the present state of knowledge, or rather ignorance, of 
 all dates to be assigned to the philosophical Sutras, it is the 
 duty of every scholar to abstain from premature assertions 
 which only encumber and obstruct the way to further dis- 
 coveries. 
 
 Second Century B.C. 
 
 The second century would certainly be most welcome as 
 a date for any of our extant philosophical Sutras, but 
 that is no excuse for saying that the Yoga-philosophy was 
 reduced to the form of Sutras in that century, because the 
 grammarian Patatfgali has been referred to that date. 
 Besides, even the date assigned to thef grammarian Patam/ali 
 is a constructive date only, and should not for the present 
 be considered as more than a working hypothesis. The 
 fact that these Yoga-Sutras do not enter on any controversy 
 might certainly seem to speak in favour of their being 
 anterior to the other Sutras ; but we saw already why we 
 could no more build any chronological conclusions on this 
 than we should think of proving the anteriority of our 
 Samkhya-Sutras by the attacks on its atheistical doctrines 
 which occur in the Sutras of the other philosophical systems. 
 I think we must be satisfied with the broad fact that 
 Buddha was later than the classical Upanishads, and that 
 our philosophical Sutras are later than Buddha, because 
 they evidently refer to his doctrines, though not to his 
 name. As to popular tradition, it is no doubt of little 
 value, particularly in India ; still I doubt whether tradition 
 could have gone so completely wrong as to prophesy in the 
 Sankshepa-amkara-Vi</aya l and elsewhere that ffaimini, 
 Vyasa, Pata/tyali, and >amkara would appear on earth to 
 uproot all heresies, if they had lived before the great heresy 
 of Buddha. Pata/7r/ali is said to have been a portion of 
 Sankarshawa or Ananta, the hooded serpent esha, encir- 
 cling the world, and it may be for the same reason 'that 
 he is sometimes called PhaTiin (Pha?*ibhartri). This is the 
 kind of useless information which tradition gives us. 
 1 Yoga Aphorisms, p. Ixvi. 
 
CHRONOLOGY OF THOUGHT. 315 
 
 Chronology of Thought. 
 
 In India we must learn to be satisfied with the little we 
 know, not of the chronology of years, but of the chronology 
 of thought; and taking the Yoga, in its systematic form, 
 i.e. in the Pata^ali-Sutras, as post-Buddhistic, we can 
 best understand the prominence which it gives both to th 
 exercises which are to help toward overcoming the dis- 
 tracting influences of the outer world, and to the arguments 
 in support of the existence of an Isvara or Divine Lord. 
 This marked opposition became intelligible and necessary 
 as directed against Kapila as well as against Buddha ; and 
 in reading the Yoga-Sutras it is often difficult to tf&y 
 whether the author had his eye on the one or the other. 
 If we took away these two characteristic features of the 
 Yoga, the wish to establish the existence of an Isvara 
 against all coiners, and to teach the means of restraining 
 the affections and passions of the soul, as a preparation for 
 true 'knowledge, such as taught by the Sa?nkhya-philosophy, 
 littl'3 'Would seem to remain that is peculiar to Patafigrali. 
 
 But though the Sutras are post-Buddhistic, there can be 
 no doubt that not only the general outlines of the Samkhya, 
 but likewise all that belongs to the Karmayoga or work- 
 yoga was "known before the rise of Buddhism. Thus, if 
 we turn to the Mahabharata, we find that the twenty-four 
 principia, with Purusha as the twenty-fifth, are often 
 mentioned, though arranged and described in different 
 ways. Then we read again (Anugita XXV) : ' That which 
 sageis by their understanding meditate upon, which is void 
 of smell, of taste, of colour, touch or sound, that is called 
 Pradlhana (Prakriti). That Pradhaiia is unperceived; a 
 development of this unperceived power is the Mahat ; and 
 a development of the Pradhana (when it has) become 
 Mahat, is Ahawkara (egoism). From Ahamkara is pro- 
 duced the development, namely, the great elements, and 
 from the elements respectively, the objects of sense are 
 staked to be a development/ 
 
 As to the Yoga-practices or tortures we know that, 
 after practising the most severe Tapas for a time, Buddha 
 himself declared against it, and rather moderated than 
 
INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 encouraged the extravagant exercises of Brahmanic as- 
 cetics. His own experience at the beginning of his career 
 had convinced him of their uselessriess, nay, of their 
 danger. But a moderately ascetic life, a kind of via 
 media, remained throughout the ideal of Buddhism, and 
 we can well understand that the Brahmans, in trying to 
 hold their own against the Buddhists, should have tried ta 
 place before the people an even more perfect system of 
 asceticism. And, lest it should be supposed that the 
 Sa?nkhya-philosophy, which was considered as orthodox 
 or Vedic, had given its sanction to Buddha's denial of an 
 Atman and Brahman, which was far more serious than the 
 denial of an Isvara, Lord, it would have seemed all the 
 more necessary to protest decidedly .against such denial, 
 and thus to satisfy the ingrained theistic tendencies of 
 the people at large, by showing that the Samkhya, by 
 admitting Purusha, admitted a belief in something tran- 
 scendent, and did by no means, according to Pata/J#ali 
 at least, condemn a belief even in an Isvara, or Lord. 
 In that sense it might truly be said that the Yog*a- 
 philosophy would have been timely and opportune, if it 
 came more boldly forward, after the rise of Buddhism, 
 not so much as a new system of thought, but as a re- 
 invigorated and determined assertion of ancient S&mkhya 
 doctrines, which for a time had beei), thrown Into the 
 shade by the Buddhist apostasy. Iry this way it Would 
 become intelligible that Buddhism, though sprung from 
 a soil saturated with S&mkhya ideas, should have been 
 anterior to that new and systematic development of 
 Sarakhya-philosophy, which we know in the Sfttras of 
 Kapila or in the itarikas or even in the Tattva-sarnLsa ; 
 that in fact, in its elements, the Sa?nkhya should be as 
 decidedly pre-Buddhistic as in its final systematic foirm 
 it was post-Buddhistic. That the existence side by side 
 of two such systems as thoso of Kapila and Buddha, tihe 
 one d'eemed orthodox, the other unorthodox, gave matter 
 for reflection to the people in India we see best by a 
 well-known verse which I quoted many years ago in 
 my History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature (p. 102): 'If 
 Bu.ddha knew the law and Kapila not, what is truth? 
 
THE YOGA-PHILOSOPHY. 317 
 
 If both were omniscient, how could there be difference of 
 opinion between the two ? ' 
 
 The Yoga-Philosophy. 
 
 The Yoga-Siitras, or the Yoganusasaria *, called also by 
 the same name which was giv^n to the Sa/mkhya-SiHras, 
 viz. Sa/mkhya-prava/cana, both being considered as ex- 
 positions of the old Samkhya, may have been contained 
 originally in some such text-book as the Tattva-samasa. 
 The Sutras were published and translated by Ballantyne, 
 1853, a translation continued by Govindadeva-.sastrin in 
 the Pandit, vol. Ill, Nos. 28-68. A more useful edition, 
 but not always quite correct translation, was given by 
 Rajendralal Mitra in the Bibliotheca Indiea. 1883, 'Yoga 
 Aphorisms of Pata;7(/ali, with the commentary of Bho^a 
 R%a.' Vi<7/?ana-Bhikshu. whose commentary on Kapila's 
 Samkhya- Sutras was mentioned before 2 , and who is chiefly 
 
 1 It is not much of an argument, but it may deserve to be mentioned, 
 that th* title given by Pata%ali to the Yoga-Sutras, Atha Yoganusasanam, 
 'Now begins tbe teaching of the Yoga/ and not Atha Yogat/igwasa, reminds 
 us of the title which the grammarian Pta%ali gives to his Mahabhashya, 
 Atha Sabdanusasanam, *Now begins the teaching of Words or of tho 
 Word.' This title does not belong to Panini's Sutras, but to the Maha- 
 bhashya; and it is curious that such a compound as Sabdanusasariam 
 would really oft'end against one of Panini's rules (II, 2, 14). According 
 to Panini there ought to be no such compound, and though he does not 
 give us the reason why he objects to this and other such-iike compounds, 
 we can easily see that Sanskrit did not sanction compounds which 
 might be ambiguous, considering that Word-teaching might be taken 
 in the sense of teaching coming from words as well as teaching having 
 words for its object. It is true that this apparent irregularity might 
 be removed by a reference to another rule of Piwini (II, 3, 66), yet it is 
 curious that the same, if only apparent, irregularity should occur both 
 in the Mahabhashya and in the Yoga-Sutras, both being ascribed to 
 Pata?1grali. 
 
 a Other works ascribed to the same author are : 
 
 The Brahma-mimawsa-bhashya, called Vigrnananm'ta. 
 
 The Sawkhya-karika-bhashya, ascribed to him, but really composed 
 by Gandapada (see Ganganatha, p. 2). 
 
 The Yoga-varttika. 
 
 The Isvara-gita-bhashya, from the Kurrna -purawa. 
 
 The Prasnopanishad-aloka. 
 
 An explanation of Prasastnpada's commentary on the Vaisoshika- 
 Sutras, called Vaiseshika-varttika. 
 
 There are printed editions of the Sawkhya-prava&ana-bhashya, the 
 Yoga-varttika, and the Samkhya-sara. 
 
31 8 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 known by his Yoga-v&rttika, is the author also of the 
 ,Yoga-stra-samgraha, an abstract of the Yoga, which has 
 been edited and translated by Ganganatha Jha, Bombay 
 1894, and may be consulted with advantage by students 
 of philosophy. Colebrooke's essay on the Yoga, like all 
 his essays, is still most useful and trustworthy ; and there 
 are in German the excellent papers on the Sa?nkhya and 
 Yoga by Professor Garbe in Buhler's Grundriss. Garbe 
 speaks well of a dissertation by P. Markus, Die Yoga- 
 philosophic nach dem Rajamdrtanda dargesteilt, which, 
 however,, I have not been able to obtain. 
 
 Misconception of the Objects of Yoga. 
 
 It was almost impossible that the Yoga-philosophy, as 
 represented by European scholars, should not have suffered 
 from its close association with the Samkhya, properly so 
 called. All its metaphysical antecedents were there. Yoga 
 is indeed, as the Brahmans say, Samkhya, only modified, 
 particularly in one point, namely, in its attempt to develop 
 and systematise an ascetic discipline by which concentration 
 of thought could be attained, and by admitting devotion 
 to the Lord God as part of that discipline. Whether this 
 was done, as is generally supposed, from mere theological 
 diplomacy is a question we should find difficult tor answer, 
 considering how little we know of the personal character 
 of Patawgali or of the circumstances under which he 
 elaborated his theistic Samkhya-philosophy. There is an 
 entire absence o^ animosity on his part, such as our own 
 philosophers would certainly have displayed in accusing 
 another philosopher of atheism and in trying to amend his 
 system in a theistic direction. No doubt there must 
 always have been a majority in favour of a theistic 
 philosophy of the universe as against an atheistic, but 
 whether Patatf^ali may be fairly accused of having yielded 
 to the brutal force of numbers, and curried favour with 
 the many against the few is quite another question. It is 
 certainly extraordinary to see the perfect calmness with 
 which, with very few exceptions, Kapila's atheism is dis- 
 cussed, and how little there is of the ad populum advocacy 
 
DEVOTION TO ISVARA, MISCONCEPTIONS. 319 
 
 in support of a belief in God and a personal God. Nor 
 does Kapila, like other atheistic philosophers, display any 
 animosity against the Divine idea and its defenders. He 
 criticises indeed the usual arguments by which theists 
 make and unmake their God, if they represent Him as the 
 creator and ruler of the world, and charge him at the same 
 time with cruelty, by making him responsible for the origin 
 of evil also. But all this is done by Kapila in a calm and 
 what one might almost call a businesslike manner ; and in 
 answering Kapila's arguments, Pata^ali also preserves the 
 same Samatva or even temper. He imputes no motives 
 to his antagonist, nor does ho anywhere defend himself 
 against any possible suspicion that in showing the neces- 
 sity of a personal God, an Lsvara, he was defending the 
 interests of the Brahman priesthood. After all, t&vara 
 was not even a popular name for God, or the name of any 
 special god, though it occurs as a name of Rudra, and in 
 later times was applied even to such gods as Vislmu and 
 $iva, after they had been divested of much of their old 
 mythological trappings. 
 
 Devotion to isvara, Misconceptions. 
 
 In this respect also we have something to learn from 
 Hindu philosophers. Considering the importance of the 
 subject, it is useful to see how little heat was expended on 
 it either by Kapila or by Pata/tyali. If we remember how 
 the two philosophies were in popular parlance distinguished 
 from each other as Samkhya with and Sa?7ikhya without 
 a Lord, we should have expected to see this question treated 
 in the most prominent place. Instead of which we find 
 Pata;?$ali, at the end of the? first chapter, after having 
 described the different practices by which a man may hope 
 to become free from all worldly fetters, mentioning simply 
 as one of many expedients, I, 23, * Devotion to the Lord/ 
 or, as it is generally translated, ' devotion to God/ Devotion 
 or Pranidhana (lit. placing oneself forward and into) is 
 explained by Bhot/a as one of the forms of resignation, as 
 worship of Him, and as the surrender of all one's actions 
 to Him,, If a man, without wishing for any rewards con- 
 
32O INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 sisting in worldly enjoyments, makes over all his cares to 
 tsvara as the highest guide, that, we are told, is Pranidhana. 
 Pata/7r/ali then goes on, c As it has been said that SamadhL 
 or complete absorption can be obtained through devotion 
 to the Lord, the next that has to be explained in order, is 
 the nature of that Lord, the proof, the majesty, the name 
 of Him, the order of His worship, and the fruit thereof/ 
 In I, 24 Pata/7qali goes on to say : ' Isvara, the Lord, is 
 a Purusha (Self) that has never been touched by sufferings, 
 actions, rewards, or consequent dispositions/ The commen- 
 tary adds : * Sufferings are such as Nescience, Avidya, &c. ; 
 actions are either enjoined, forbidden, or mixed ; rewards 
 are the ripened fruits of actions manifested in birth (genus, 
 caste) and life, while dispositions (Asaya, Arilage) are so- 
 called because they lie in the soil of the mind till the fruit 
 has ripened, they are instincts (Sa??>skara) or impressions 
 (Vasana). If the Lord is called a Purusha, that means that 
 He is different from all other Purushas (Selves), and if Hi* 
 is called Lord, that means that He is able by His work 
 alone to liberate the whole world. Such power is due to 
 the constant prevalence of goodness (a Gu?m) in Him, who 
 has no beginning, and this prevalence of goodness arises 
 from His eminent knowledge. But the two, knowledge 
 and power, are not dependent on each other, for they are 
 eternally abiding in the very substance of tsvafa. His 
 very relation to that goodness is without beginning, be- 
 cause the union of Prakriti and Purusha, that is, the 
 creation would, from a Yoga point of view, have been 
 impossible without the will of such an Lsvara. While the 
 ATitta or mind in ordinary Purushas or Selves undergoes, 
 while in the body, modifications tending towards happiness, 
 unhappiness, and delusion, and, if remaining without 
 blemish, good, and full of virtue, becomes conscious of 
 the incidence of the pictures mirrored on the mind, it 
 is not so with Isvara. His highest modification is of 
 goodness alone, and he remains steadfast in enjoyment 
 through eternal union with it. Therefore he alone is 
 Isvara, eminent above all other Purushas. Again, even for 
 one who has gained freedom, a return of sufferings, &c., 
 is possible, and has to be guarded against by such means 
 
WHAT IS ISVARA? 321 
 
 as are inculcated in the Yoga ; but he, the tsvara, as he is 
 always .such as he is, is not like a man who has gained 
 freedom, but he is by nature free. Nor should one say 
 that there may be many such Isvaras. Though there be 
 equality of Purushas, qud Purushas, yet as their aims are 
 different, such a view would be impossible. And though 
 there be a possibility of more or less, yet the most eminent 
 would always be the Isvara or the Lord, he alone having 
 reached the final goal of lordship/ 
 
 The Pataw#ala-bhashya dwells very strongly on this 
 difference between the liberated soul and the Lord ; for 
 'the liberated or isolated souls/ it says, 'attain their 
 isolation by rending asunder the three bonds, whereas in 
 regard to Isvara there never was and never can be such 
 bondage. The emancipated implies bondage, but this can 
 never be predicated of the Lord/ 
 
 We need not point out here the weak points of this 
 argument, and the purely relative character of the great- 
 ness and separateness claimed for th Isvara, as compared 
 with other Purushas, but it may be well to try to compare 
 our own ideas of God, when put into clear and simple 
 language, with the ideas here propounded. Pata/?#ali 
 seems to me to come very near to the Homoiousia of man 
 with God, though he does jnot go quite as far as the Ve- 
 d&ntin who claims for the Atmari perfect Homoousia with 
 Brahman. Eis Isvara may be primus inter pares, but as 
 one of the Purushas, he is but one among his peers/ He 
 
 j is a little more than a god, but he is certainly not what we 
 
 i itfean by God. 
 
 
 What is 
 
 As Kapila had declared that the existence of such a being 
 as tsvara did not admit of proof, Pata%ali proceeds in the 
 . next Sutra to offer what he calls his proofs, by saying : 
 , ' In Him the seed of the omniscient (or omniscience) attains 
 infinity/ It would be difficult to discover in this anything 
 like a proof or a tenable appeal to any Pram&Tia, without 
 the help of the commentary. But Bho#a explains that 
 what is meant here is that there are different degrees of 
 all excellences, such as omniscience, greatness, smallness, 
 
 y. 
 
322 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 and other Aisvaryas, and that therefore there mi^st be for 
 all of them a point beyond which it is impossible to go. 
 This Niratiseya point, this non plus ultra of excellency 
 i what is claimed for Isvara or the Lord. 
 
 Though this could hardly be considered as a convincing 
 argument of the existence of a Being endowed with all such 
 transcendent excellences as are here postulated, it shows 
 at all events an honest intention on the part- of Pata/Tgali. 
 Pata%ali's argument reminds us to a certain extent of the 
 theistic argument of Cleanthes and Boethius. What he 
 means is that where there is a great and greater, there must 
 also be a greatest, and this is Lsvara, and that where there 
 is good and better, there must be best. 
 
 Nor does he flinch in trying to answer the questions 
 which follow. The question is supposed to have been 
 asked, how this Isvara, without any inducement, could have 
 caused that union and separation of himself and Prakr/ti 
 which, as we saw, is only another name for creation. The 
 answer is that the inducement was his love of beings, 
 arising from his mercifulness, his determination being to 
 save all living beings at the time of the Kalpapralayas and 
 Mahapralayas, the great destructions and reconstructions 
 of the world. This, of course, would not have been admitted 
 by Kapila. 
 
 Next Pata#</ali proceeds to explain the majestyof Isvara 
 by saying, in I, 26, 
 
 ' He is the superior (Guru) even of the former ones, being 
 himself not limited by time/ 
 
 By the former ones are meant, as we are told, the ancients, 
 the first creators, such as Brahma and others, and by 
 , superior is meant instructor and guide, so that it would 
 seem difficult to assign a higher. / position to any divine 
 being than by placing him thus above Brahma and other 
 accepted builders of the world. Next follows his name. 
 I, 27 : 
 
 1 His name is Pra?iava.' 
 
 PraTiava might etyrnologically mean breathing forth or 
 glory. It is assigned as a name to the sacred syllable Om, 
 possibly a relic of a time beyond our reach. It is said 
 to have been the name of Isvara from all eternity, just as 
 
WHAT IS I&VAEA 2 323 
 
 the name of father or son. This may be true, but it does 
 not satisfy us. However old the name PraTiava and the 
 syllable Om.may have been, they must have had a begin- 
 ning, but in spite of all the theories of the Brahmans, there 
 is not one in the least satisfactory to the scholar. Om is 
 their sacred syllable, which has to be repeated a hundred 
 or a thousand times in order to draw the mind away Irani 
 all disturbing impressions and to concentrate it on th^ 
 Supreme Being. But why it is so we cannot tell. It may 
 be a mere imitation of the involuntary outbreathing of the 
 deep vowel o, stopped by the labial nasal, and then drawn 
 in ; or it may be the contraction of a pronominal stem 
 Avam, ' that/ corresponding to Ayam, 'this/ and it is cer- 
 tainly used in the sense of Yes, much as hoc illud ? was used 
 in French when contracted to GUI. But however that may 
 be, it is called Prawava, praise or breathing forth, and can- 
 not be explained any further etymologically. It is a name, 
 as Bho</a says, not made by anybody, and if it has any 
 historical or etymological justification, this is at all events 
 not known to us. Still we cannot go quite so far as 
 Rajendralal Mitra, who sees in it an Indianised form of the 
 Hebrew Amen I First of all, Amen does not mean God, 
 and how should such a word have reached India during 
 the BrahmaTia period ? 
 
 Pataw/ali continues by telling us in StHra I, 38, tfealt 
 repetition of the syllable Om and reflection on its meaning 
 are incumbent on the student of Yoga. And this, as Bho#a 
 adds, as a means to concentrate our thoughts, and to attain 
 to Samadhi, the chief end of the whole Yoga-philosophy. 
 In that sense he adds, I, 29 : 
 
 * Thence also obtainment of inward-turned thought, and 
 absence of obstacles/ 
 
 Inward-turned thought (Pratyak&etana) is explained as 
 a turning away of our senses from all outward objects, 
 and turning them back upon the mind. The obstacles to 
 'Samadhi are mentioned in the next Sfttra, I, 30, as 
 
 'Disease, languor, doubt, carelessness, idleness, worldliness, 
 error, not having a settled standpoint, and not keeping it ; 
 these are the obstacles causing unsteadiness of mind/ 
 
 1,31. 'With them arise pain, distress, tremor of limbs, 
 
324 'INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 and disturbance of the regular inbreathing and out- 
 breathing/ 
 
 I, 32. 'To prevent all this, there is constant* fixing of th 
 mind on one subject (Tattva)/ 
 
 I ? 33, 'And likewise from a reviving friendliness, pity, 
 complacency, and indifference towards objects of happiness, 
 unhappiness, virtue and vice, there arises serenity of mind.' 
 
 The commentator adds, 'If one sees happy people, one 
 should not envy them; if one sees unhappiness, one should 
 think how it could be removed ; if one sees virtuous people, 
 one should rejoice and not say, Are they really virtuous ? 
 if one sees vicious people, one should preserve indifference, 
 and show neither approval nor aversion. Thus does the 
 mind become serene and capable of Sam&dhi. But all these 
 are only outward helps towards fixing the mind on one 
 -subject, and of thus in time obtaining Samadhi. 1 
 
 I have given this extract in order to show how subordinate 
 a position is occupied in Pata/ik/ali's mind by the devotion 
 to Isvara. It is but one of the many meSns for steadying 
 the mind, and thus realising that Viveka or discrimination 
 between the true man (Purusha) and the objective world 
 (Prakriti). This remains in the Toga as it was in the 
 S&mkhya, the &ummum bcrnum of mankind. I do not 
 think, therefore, that Rajendralal Mitra was right^when in 
 his abstract of the Yoga (p. lii) he represented tfiis belief 
 in one Supreme God as the first and most important tenet 
 of Patatf grsli'fl philosophy. 4 The leading tenets of the 
 Yogins,' he says, c are first, that there is a Supreme God- 
 head who is purely spiritual, or all soul, perfectly free from 
 afflictions, works, deserts, and desires. His symbol is Om, 
 and He rewards those who are ardently devoted to Him 
 by facilitating their attainment of liberation ; but He does 
 not directly grant it. Nor is He the father, creator, or 
 protector of the universe, with which He is absolutely 
 unconnected/ 
 
 Rajendralal Mitra does not stand alone in this opinion, 
 and the very name of Sesvara-S&mkhya. theistic Samkhya, 
 given to the Yoga, would seem to speak in his favour. 
 But we have only to look at the Sfttras themselves to see 
 that originally this belief in a personal God was by no 
 
WHAT IS LSVARA? 325 
 
 means looked upon as the most characteristic feature of 
 Pata/fyali's system. 
 
 Rajendralal Mitra is right, however, in stating the tenet, 
 < second in importance, to have been that there are countless 
 individual souls or Pui;ushas which animate living beings, 
 and are eternal. They are pure and immutable ; but by 
 their association jwith the universe they become indirectly 
 the experiences of joys and sorrows, and assume innumerable 
 embodied forms in the course of an ever-recurring metem- 
 psychosis.' . 
 
 The Isvara, with the Yogins, was originally no more than 
 one of the many souls, or rather Selves or Purushas, but 
 one that has never been associated with or implicated in 
 metempsychosis, supreme in every sense, yet of the same 
 kind as all other Purushas. The idea of other Purushas 
 obtaining union with him could therefore never have 
 entered Pata/tyali's head. According to him, the highest 
 object of the Yogin was freedom, aloneness, aloofness, or 
 self-centredness. As one of the useful means of obtaining 
 that freedom, or of quieting the mind previous to liberating 
 it altogether, devotion to the tsvara is mentioned, but again 
 as one only out of many means, and not even as the most 
 efficacious of all. In the popular atmosphere of India this 
 belief in one Supreme Being may have been a strong point 
 in favour of Pata;7^ali's system, but from a philosophical 
 point of view, Patatfgrali's so-called proofs of the existence 
 of God would hardly stand against any criticism. They 
 are mere Trdpepya, or side issues. We must remember that 
 Kapila had committed himself to no^more than that it is 
 impossible to prove the existence of Isvara, this Isvara not 
 being synonymous with God, in the highest sense of the word, 
 but restricted to a personal creator and ruler of the world. 
 Such a confession of an inability to prove the existence of 
 an Isvara does not amount to atheism, in the current sense 
 of that word, and thus only can we explain the fact that 
 Kapila himself was considered orthodox by friends and 
 foes. In the Vedanta-philosophy the question of the real 
 existence of a personal Isvara never arises, though we 
 know how saturated that philosophy is with a belief in the 
 existence of Brahman, the absolute Divine Essence of which 
 
326 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 the active or personal tsvara or the Lord is but a passing 
 manifestation, presented by Brahma, masc., a mere phase 
 of Brahman, neuter. The Samkhya, in attempting tor 
 explain the universe, such as it is, both in its subjective 
 and objective character, has no need to call in the assistance 
 of a personal Isvara. What we mean by the objective 
 world is, according to Kapila, the work or outcome of Pra- 
 kriti, when animated by Purusha, not of Brahman. His 
 system is therefore without a creator or personal maker of 
 the world, but if we called it therefore atheistic, we should 
 have to apply the same name to Newton's system of the 
 world and Darwin's theory of evolution, though we know 
 that both Newton and Darwin were thoroughly religious 
 men. Darwin himself went so far as to maintain most 
 distinctly that his system of nature required a Creator who 
 breathed life into it in the beginning, and even those Dar- 
 winians who look upon this admission of Darwin's as a 
 mere weakness of the moment, would strongly object to 
 be called irreligious or atheists. Kapila might easily have 
 used the very words of Darwin, and this is very much 
 what Pata;1gali actually did in his Yoga-Sutras. His 
 supreme Purusha ; afterwards raised into an Adi-Purusha, 
 or First Being, satisfied the human craving after a First 
 Cause, and, so far as I can see, it was this natural craving 
 rather than any vulgar wish to curry favour with the 
 orthodox party in India that led to Pata ng&li's partial 
 separation from .Kapila. We certainly need not suppose 
 that the recognition of Kapila's orthodoxy was a mere 
 contrivance of theological diplomacy on the part of the 
 Brahmans, and that these defenders of the faith were 
 satisfied with an insincere recognition of the supreme 
 authority of the-Veclas. I confess that with what we know 
 of the religious life of India and the character of the Brah- 
 mans at all times, it seems to. me very difficult to admit 
 the idea of such a compromise. Besides, Kapila appeals, 
 as we saw, to the Veda in good earnest, particularly when 
 it supports his own views, as in V, 12, when he wants to 
 prove ' that the world arises from primitive matter/ and 
 appeals to the Veda, that is, to such passages as /Svetas- 
 vatara Upanishad IV, 5, and Brihad. Ar. Up. I, 4, 7, that 
 
KAPILAS REAL ARGUMENTS. 327 
 
 can be made to support his view. The two oldest repre- 
 sentatives of the Samkhya-philosophy, the Tattva-sainasa 
 . and the Karikas *, do not even allude to the difficulty 
 arising from the Isvara question, which seems to me an 
 important argument in favour of their antiquity. The 
 charge of atheism became more popular in later times, so 
 that in the Padma-pura/na the charge of atheism is brought 
 not against the Samkhya only, but against the Vaiseshika 
 and Nyaya-philosophies also, nay even against the Purva- 
 Mimamsa. Two systems only escape this charge, the 
 Uttara-Mimarasa and the Yoga; and in the case of the 
 Uttara-Mimamsa, its explanation by $amkara is stigmatised 
 as no better than Buddhism, because it perverts the mean- 
 ing of passages of the Veda, which teach the identity of 
 the individual soul with the highest soul (Brahman without 
 qualities), and recommends the surrender of good works, 
 and complete indifference towards this world and the next. 
 
 Kapila's Real Arguments. 
 
 But it is but fair that we snould hear what Kapila him- 
 self has to say. And here it is important again to observe 
 that Kapila does not make a point of vehemently denying 
 the existence of an Isvara, but seems likewise to have been 
 brought to discuss the subject, as it were, by the way only, 
 while engaged in discussing the nature of sensuous percep- 
 tion (I, 89). He had been explaining perception as cogni- 
 tion arising from actual contact between the senses and 
 their respective objects. And here he is stopped by the 
 inevitable opponent who (lemurs to this definition of per- 
 ception, because it would not include, as he says, the 
 perceptions of the Yogins. Kapila replies that these visions 
 of the Yogins do not refer to external objects, and that, 
 without denying their reality, he is dealing with the per- 
 ceptions of ordinary mortals only. But the controversy 
 does not end here. Another opponent starts up and main- 
 tains that Kapila's definition of perception is faulty, <?f at 
 all events not wide enough because it does not include the 
 
 1 Hall, Preface to Sawkliya-sara, p. 39, note, and Introducttor to 
 Sawkhya-prava/cana. 
 
328 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 perception of the Isvara or Lord. It is then that Kapila 
 turns round on his opponent, and says that this Isvara, this, 
 as it is pretended, perceptible tsvara, has never been provecl 
 bo exist at all, has never been established by any of the 
 three legitimate instruments of knowledge or PramfiTias. 
 This may seem to us to amount to a . denial of an tsvara, 
 but Vigr/i&na-Bhikshii remarks with a great deal of truth, 
 that if Eapila had wished to deny the existence of God, he 
 would have said Isvarabhav&t, and not IsvarasiddheA, that 
 is, because Isvara does npt exist, and not, as he says, 
 because Isvara has not been proved to exist. Anyhow this 
 is not the tone of a philosopher who wants to preach 
 atheism, and in what follows we shall see that it is the 
 manner rather than the matter of the -proof of an Isvara 
 which is challenged by Kapila and defended by his 
 antagonist. Taking his stand on the ground that the 
 highest blessedness or freedom consists in having renounced 
 all acti\ 7 ity, because every activity presupposes some kind 
 of desire, which is of evil, he says ' that every proof in 
 support of an Isvara as a maker or Lord, a Sat-kara, ~vould 
 break down. For if he were supposed to be above all 
 variance and free, he could not have willed to create the 
 world; if he were not so, he would be distracted and 
 deluded and unfit for the supreme task of an Isvara/ Then 
 follows a more powerful objection, based on the Tact that 
 the Veda speaks of an Isvara or Lord, and therefore he 
 must exist. Kapila does not spurn that argument, but, as 
 he has recognised once for all the Veda as a legitim^e 
 source of information, he endeavours to prove that the 
 Vedic passages relied on in support of the existence of a 
 maker of the world, have a different purpose, namely the 
 
 glorification of a liberated Self or Purusha, or of one who 
 y devotion has attained supernatural power (I, 95). This 
 is explained by Aniruddha as referring either to a Self 
 which is almost, though not altogether, free, because if 
 altogether free, it could have no desire, nor even the desire 
 of creation; or to a Yogin who by devotion has obtained 
 supernatural powers. Vigrtfana-Bhikshu goes a step further, 
 and declares that it refers either to a Self that has obtained 
 freedom from all variance and disturbance, or to the Self that 
 
KABILA'S BEAL ARGUMENTS. 329 
 
 is and has remained free from all eternity, that is, to the 
 Adi-purusha, the First Self, who in the theistic Yoga-philo- 
 sophy takes the place of the Creator, and who may, for all 
 we know, have been the origin of the later Purushottama. 
 
 Aniruddha thereupon continues that it might be said 
 that without the superintendence of some such intelligent 
 being, unintelligent Prakriti would never have acted. But 
 this also he rejects, if it is meant to prove the existence of 
 an active creator, because the superintendence of the 
 Purusha of the Sa/wkhyas over Prakriti is not an active 
 one, but arises simply from proximity, as in the case of 
 a crystal (I. 96). What he means is that in the S&mkhya 
 the Purusha is never a r'eal maker or an agent. He simply 
 reflects on Prakriti, or the products of Prakriti are reflected 
 on him ; and as anything reflected in a crystal or a mirror 
 -seems to move when the mirror is moved, though it remains 
 all the time quite unmoved, thus the Purusha also seems to 
 move and to be an agent, while what is really moving, 
 changing, or being created is Prakriti. The Purusha there- 
 fore cannot be called superintendent, as if exercising an 
 active influence over Prakriti, but Prakrit! is evolved up 
 to the point of Manas under the eyes of Purusha, and the 
 Purusha does no more than witness all this, wrongly 
 imagining all the time that he is himself the creator or 
 ruler of the world. In support of this Aniruddha quotes 
 a passage from the Bhagavad-gita (III, 27 ): * All emar ations 
 of Prakrit! are operated by the GuTias ; but the Self 
 deluded by Ahamkara imagines that he is the operator/ 
 
 Another objection is urged against the S&mkhya view 
 that the Purusha is not a doer or creator, namely that, in 
 that case, a dead body also might be supposed to perform 
 the act of eating. But no, he says, such acts are performed 
 not by a v dead or inactive Atman, as little as a dead body 
 eats. It is the individual Purusha (6riva) that performs 
 such acts, when under the influence of Prakriti (Buddhi, 
 Ahamkara, and Manas), while the Atman or Purusha 
 remains for ever unchanged. 
 
 A last attempt is made to disprove the neutrality or non- 
 activity of the Atman, that is, the impossibility of his being 
 a creator, namely the uselessness of teaching anything, 
 
330 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 supposing the Self to be altogether without cognition. To 
 this the answer is that though the Atman is not cognitive, 
 yet the Manas is. The Atman reflects on the Manas, and 
 hence the illusion that he himself cognises, while in reality 
 he does no more than witness the apprehension of the 
 Manas. Thus when it is said, ' He is omniscient and omni- 
 potent/ he (in spite of the gender) is meant for Prakriti, as 
 developed into Manas, and not for the Purusha who in 
 reality is a mere witness of such omniscience and omni- 
 potence (III, 56), deluded, for a time, by Prakriti. 
 
 - 
 
 The Theory of Harm an. 
 
 In another place where the existence of an Isvara, or 
 active ruler of the world, is once more discussed in the 
 Samkhya-Sutras, the subject is again treated not so much 
 for its own sake, as in order to settle the old question of 
 the continuous effectiveness of works (Karman). The 
 reward of every work done, according to Kapila, does not 
 depend on any ruler of the world ; the works themselves 
 are working on for evermore. If it were otherwise, we 
 should have to ascribe the creation of the world, with all 
 its suffering, to a Lord who is nevertheless supposed to be 
 loving and gracious. 
 
 Madhava in his Sarva-darsana-saragraha (translated by 
 Cowell arid Gough, p. 228) uses the same argument, saying : 
 ' As for the doctrine of " a Supreme Being who acts from 
 compassion/ what has been proclaimed by beat of drum 
 by the advocates of His existence, this has wellnigh passed 
 away out of hearing, since the hypothesis fails to meet 
 either of the two alternatives. For does He act thus before 
 or after creation ? If you say before, we reply that as pain 
 cannot arise in the absence of bodies, &c., there will be no 
 need, as long as there is no creation, for any desire to free 
 living beings from pain (which is the main characteristic of 
 compassion) ; and if you adopt the second alternative, you 
 will be reasoning in a circle, as on the one hand you will 
 hold that God created the world through compassion, and 
 on the other hand that He compassionated it after He had 
 created it/*' 
 
THE THEORY OF KARMAN. 331 
 
 i 
 
 And again, as every activity presupposes desire, the Lord, 
 whether working for Himself or for others, would ipso facto 
 cease to be free from desires. This argument is examined from 
 different points of view, but always leads to^the same result 
 in the end ; that is to say, to the conviction that the highest 
 state of perfection and freedom from all conditions is really 
 far higher than the ordinary conception of the status of the 
 popular Hindu deities, higher even than that of an 1 svara, 
 if conceived as a maker and ruler of the universe. This 
 concept of the liberated Purusha or Atman has in fact 
 superseded the concept of the Isvara, and to have made 
 this quite clear would have been, on the part of Kapila, by 
 far the most effective defence against the charge of atheism 1 . 
 The conscience of Kapila and of the ancient Samkhyas was 
 evidently satisfied with a belief in a Purusha in which the 
 old Concepts of the divine and the human had been welded 
 into one, without claiming even the aid of an Adi-purusha, 
 a first Purusha, which was a later expedient. 
 
 Nor must it be forgotten that other philosophies also 
 besides the Samkhya have been suspected or openly 
 accused of atheism for the same reason. It is easy to 
 understand why almost every philosophy, whether Indian 
 or European, if it endeavours to purify, to dehumanise, and 
 to exalt the idea of the Godhead, can hardly avoid the 
 suspicion of denying the old gods, or of being without 
 a belief in the God of the vulgar. It is well known that 
 on that ground even the early Christians did not escape the 
 suspicion of atheism. 
 
 Even Craimini's Purva-Mima/wsa, though based on the 
 belief that the Veda is of superhuman origin, and though 
 entirely devoted to the interpretation of the Vedic sacrifice, 
 has been charged with* atheism, because it admitted the 
 independent evolution of works, which was supposed to 
 imply a denial of God ; nor did the Nyaya and Vaiseshika 
 systems, as wt sw, escape the same suspicion. It may be 
 that the recognition of the authority of the Veda was con- 
 sidered sufficient to quiet the theological conscience; but 
 there is certainly, so far as I can see, no passage in the 
 Nyaya and Vaiseshika-Sutras where an Isvara is clearly 
 denied or postulated , either as the author or as the controller 
 
INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 of the infinitesimally small elements or atoms of which the 
 world is by them supposed to consist. There is one passage 
 in the Nyaya-Sfttras in which the question of a divine Lord 
 is discussed in the usual way, namely Book V, Sfttras 19-21, 
 but otherwise we hear nothing of what the tsvara is meant 
 to be or to do. 
 
 These attacks, *as met by the Nyaya philosophers, may 
 be looked upon as purely academic, but the tone in which 
 they are m^t, for instance, by later philosophers such as 
 Madhava in his Sarva-darsana-samgraha, shows that they 
 at all events took them seriously. As specimens of Indian 
 casuistry some extracts from M&dhava's chapter on the 
 Nyaya may here be of interest. I quote from the transla- 
 tion by Cowell and Gough (p. 171) : * { It is quite true/ he 
 says, 'that none of the three Pram&nas can prove the 
 existence of a Supreme Being. Perception cannot, because 
 the Deity, being devoid of form, must be beyond the 
 senses. Inference cannot, because there is no universal 
 proposition* or middle term that could apply. The Veda 
 cannot, because we Naiyayikas have ourselves proved it 
 to be non-eternal. All this we admit to be quite true, that 
 is, we admit that a Supreme isvara cannot be established 
 by proof. But is there not, on the other side, the old 
 argument that the mountains, seas, &c., must have had 
 a maker, because they possess the nature of being effects, 
 quite as much as a jar (or, as we should say, a watch) ? 
 And that they are effects can easily be proved by the fact 
 that they possess parts, the.se parts existing in intimate 
 relation, and again by the fact that they possess a limited 
 magnitude half- way between what is infinitely great and 
 infinitesimally small.* "Nor has any proof ever been pro- 
 duced on the opposite side to show%that the mountains had 
 no maker. For if any one should argue that the mountains 
 cannot have had a maker because they were not produced 
 by a body, just as the eternal ether this pretended in- 
 ference would no more stand examination than the young 
 fawn could stand the attack of the full-grown lion, for you 
 have not even shown that what you say about the eternal 
 ether is a real fact. We therefore abide by our old argu- 
 ment that the mountains have the nature of effects, and if 
 
THE THEORY OF KAEMAN. . 333 
 
 they had no maker, they could not be effects, that, is, pro- 
 duced, not by themselves alone, but by concurrent causes, 
 jne of them being a maker. A maker is a being possessed 
 of a combination of volition, desire to act, a knowledge of 
 proper means, setting in motion all other causes, but itself 
 moved by none (the Aristotelian K.IVQVV aKwrirov).' 
 
 But though yielding to this argument, the objector asks* 
 next, what object this maker or tevara could have had in 
 view in creating the world. A feeling of compassion, if 
 he had any, should surely have induced him to create all 
 living beings happy, and not laden with misery, since this 
 militates against his compassion. Hence he concludes that 
 it would not be fitting to admit that God created the 
 world. Hereupon the Nyaya philosopher becomes very 
 wroth and exclaims : ' O thou crest-jewel of the a-theistic 
 school, be pleased to close for a moment thy envy-dimmed 
 eyes, and to consider the following suggestions. His action 
 in creating is indeed caused by compassion only, but the 
 idea of a creation which shall consist of nothing but 
 happiness is inconsistent with the nature of things, since 
 there cannot but arise eventual differences from the different 
 results which will ripen from the good and evil actions 
 (Karman) of the beings who are to be created.* 
 
 In answer to this, the atheistic opponent returns once 
 more to the authority of the Veda and says : ' But then, 
 how will you remedy your deadly sickness of reasoning in 
 a circle [for you have to prove th'e Veda by the authority 
 of God, and then again God's existence by the Veda]/ 
 
 But" the theistic interpreter and defender of the Nyaya 
 is not silenced so easily, and replies : ' We defy you to 
 point out any reasoning in a circle in our argument. Do 
 you suspect this "reciprocal dependence of each" which 
 you call "reasoning in a circle," in regard to their being 
 produced or in regard to their being known? It cannot 
 be the former, for though the production of the Veda is 
 dependent on God, still as God Himself is eternal, there is 
 no possibility of His being produced; nor can it be in 
 regard to theii being known, for even if our knowledge of 
 God were dependent on the Veda, the Veda might be 
 learned from some other source; nor, again can it be in 
 
334 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 regard to the knowledge of the non-eternity of the Veda, 
 for the non-eternity of the Veda is easily perceived by any 
 Yogin endowed with transcendent faculties (Tivra, &c..). 
 
 Therefore, when God has been rendered propitious by 
 the performance of duties which produce His favour, the 
 desired end, liberation, is obtained; thus everything is clear/ 
 
 Everything may be clear to one accustomed to the Indian 
 way of arguing; but from our point of view it would 
 certainly seem that, .though the Nyaya does not teach the 
 non-existence of an Isvara, it is not very successful in 
 proving by its logic the necessity of admitting a maker or 
 ruler of the world, that is, an tsvara. 
 
 -rne Pour Books of Yog-a-Stitras. 
 
 If now we turn to the Yoga-Sutras of Pata/?</ali we find 
 that the first book, the Samadhi-pada, is devoted to an 
 explanation of the form and aim of Yoga, and of Samadhi, 
 meditation or absorption of thought ; the second, the 
 Sadhana-pada, explains the means of arriving at tLis ab- 
 sorption ; the third, Vibhuti-pada, gives an account of the 
 supernatural powers that can be obtained by absorption 
 and ascetic exercises ; while the fourth, the Kaivalyapada, 
 explains Kaivalya to be the highest object of all these 
 exercises, of concentration of thought, and of deep absorp- 
 tion and ecstasy. Kaivalya, from Kevala, alone, means the 
 isolation of the soul from the universe and its return to 
 itself, and not to any other being, whether tsvara, Brahman, 
 or any one else. 
 
 That this is the right view of the case is confirmed by 
 the remarks made by Vi#/?ana-Bhikshu in his Yoga-sara- 
 samgraha, p. 18. Here we, are told that even when there 
 is some imperfection in the employment of the above 
 means (faith, energy, memory, absorbing meditation, and 
 knowledge), the two results (absorption and liberation) can 
 be brought very near by the grace of the Parama-lsvara, 
 the Highest Lord, and secured by devotion to Him. 
 
 By Parama-lsvara or the Highest Lord is here meant 
 that particular Purusha (Self) who was never touched by 
 the five troubles, nescience and the rest, nor by virtue or 
 
TRUE OBJECT OF YOGA. 335 
 
 vice and their various developments, or by any residue 
 (results of former deeds) in general. Vigwana-Bhikshu 
 abstains from saying much more on the Lord, because, as 
 he says, he has treated of this Being very fully in his 
 remarks on the Brahma-Sutras I, i. He probably refers 
 to his commentary on the Vedanta; and he is evidently 
 quite convinced that, however different the roads followed 
 by the Vedantins and Samkhya-yogins may be, the Divine 
 idea of both schools is much the same. He only adds that 
 the powers and omniscience of the Isvara are equalled or 
 excelled by none, that he is the spiritual chief and father 
 of all the gods, such as Brahma, Vishnu, and Hara, that he 
 imparts spiritual vision (G^ana-A:akshusV through the Vedas, 
 and that he is the inner guide, and called rramva. Devotion 
 to Him is said to consist in contemplation and to end in 
 direct perception. Steadfastness with regard to Isvara is 
 represented as the principal factor in abstract meditation 
 and in liberation, because it leads to greater nearness to 
 the final goal, steadiness with regard to the human self 
 being secondary only. This devotion to Isvara is also 
 declared to put an end to all the impediments, such as 
 illness, &c. (I, 30) ; and a passage is quoted from the Smriti, 
 ' For one desiring liberation the most comfortable path is 
 clinging to or resting on Vishnu ; otherwise, thinking only 
 with the mind, a man is sure to be deceived/ 
 
 True Object of Yoga. 
 
 It is clear throughout, the whole of this chapter on Isvara 
 that devotion to him is no more than one of the means, 
 though, it may be, a very important one, for the attainment 
 of liberation, the highest goal of the Yoga. But it is not 
 that highest goal itself, but only a means towards it, nor 
 could it be accepted as the most important feature of the 
 Yoga. The really important character of the Yoga con- 
 sists in its teaching that, however true the Samkhya-philo- 
 sophy may be, it fails to accomplish its end without those 
 practical helps which the Yoga-philosophy alone supplies. 
 The human mind, though fully enlightened as to its true 
 nature, would soon be carried away again by the torrent 
 
INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 of life ; the impressions of the senses and all the cares and 
 troubles of every-day life would return, if there were no 
 means of making the mind as firm as a rock. Now thi^ 
 steadying of the mind, this Yoga, is what Pata/fyali is 
 chiefly concerned with. 
 
 We saw that in the second Sfttra he explained Yoga as 
 /fitta-vritti-nirodha, that is, restraining or steadying the 
 actions and distractions of thought. Vritti, which I trans- 
 late by action, has also been rendered by movement or 
 function ; while iTitta, which I give as thought, has often 
 been translated by mind or the thinking principle. It is 
 curious that the Yoga should have employed a word which, 
 as far as I know, was not a recognised technical term of 
 the Samkhya. In the Samkhya, the term would be Manas, 
 mind, but Manas in a state of activity, and, of course, as 
 a development of Ahamkara and Buddhi. It has to be 
 taken here as a psychological term, as a name for thought, 
 as carried on in real life, and indirectly only of the instru- 
 ment of thought. As I had to use mind for Manas in the 
 Samkhya-pbilosophy, it would be difficult to find a better 
 rendering of the word when used by Yoga philosophers. 
 Of course Manas is always different from Buddhi, in so far 
 as it is a modification of Buddhi, which itself has passed 
 through Ahamkara or the differentiation of subjectivity 
 and objectivity. But for practical purposes, what is meant 
 by Jffitta is simply our thought or our thinking, and 
 though mind, with us also, has been defined very differently 
 by different philosophers, and is used most promiscuously 
 in common parlance, its etymological relationship with 
 Manas pointed it out as the most convenient rendering of 
 Manas, provided always that we remember its being a 
 technical term of the Yoga-philosophy, as we have to do 
 whenever we render Prakrt/ti by nature. Nirodha, re- 
 straint, does not mean entire suppression of all movements 
 of thought, but at first concentration only, though it leads 
 in the end to something like utter vacuity or self-absorption. 
 In all the functions of the Manas it must be remembered 
 that the real self-conscious seer or perceiver is, for the time 
 
FUNCTIONS OF THE MIND- 337 
 
 being, the Purusha or Self. It is he who is temporarily 
 interested in what is going on, though not absorbed in it 
 except by a delusion only. Like the moon reflected in the 
 ripples of the waters, the Self appears as moving in the 
 waves which break against it from the vast ocean of 
 Prakriti, but in reality it is riot moving. We saw that the 
 mind, when receiving impressions from the outer world, 
 was supposed in Hindu philosophy to assume for the time 
 being the actual form of the object perceived, but, when 
 once perfect in Yoga, it perceives nothing but itself. 
 
 functions of the Mind. 
 
 The principal acts and functions of the mind are described 
 as right notion, wrong notion, fancy, sleep, and remember- 
 ing, and they may be either painful or not. 
 
 Right notions are brought about by the three PramaTias, 
 so well known from different systems of Indian philosophy, 
 as sensuous perception, inference, and testimony, Vedic or 
 otherwise. It is significant A that Pata;70ali should have 
 used^Agama instead of the Aptava&ana of the Samkhya, 
 for Agama means distinctly the Veda, and thus would 
 establish once for all what is called the orthodox character 
 of the Yoga. 
 
 Wrong notions require no explanation. They are illus- 
 trated by our mistaking mother-of-pearl for silver, a rope 
 for a snake, &c. A state of doubt also when we are uncer- 
 
 in whether what we see at a distance is a man or the 
 trunk of a tree, is classed among wrong notions. 
 
 Fancy is explained as chiefly due to words ; and a 
 curious instance of fancy is given when we speak of the 
 intelligence of the Self or Purusha, or of the head of Rahu, 
 
 $ fact being that there is no intelligence belonging to 
 Self, but that the Self is altogether intelligence, just as 
 Rahu, the monster that is supposed to swallow the moon, 
 is not a being that has a head, but is a head and nothing 
 {else. 
 
 Sleep is defined as that state (Witti) of the mind which 
 ihas nothing for its object. The commentator, however, 
 jexpiains that in sleep also a kind of perception must take 
 
 t* 
 
338 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 place, because, otherwise, we could not say that we had 
 slept well or badly. 
 
 Remembering is the not wiping out of an object that has 
 once been perceived. While true perception, false percep- 
 tion, and fancy take place in a waking state, a dream, 
 which is a perception of vivid impressions, takes place in 
 sleep, while sleep itself has no perceptible object. Remem- 
 bering may depend on true or false perceptions, on fancy, 
 and even on dreams. 
 
 Exercises. 
 
 Now all these actions or functions have to be restrained, 
 and in t the end to be suppressed, and this is said to be 
 effected by exercises (Abhy&sa) and freedom from passions 
 (Vairagya), I, 12. 
 
 Indian philosophers have the excellent habit of always 
 explaining the meaning of their technical terms. Having 
 introduced for the first tinie the terms exercise and freedom 
 from passion, Pata/vgrali asks at once : ' What is Abhyasa 
 or exercise ? ' Abhyasa is generally used in the sense of 
 repetition, but he answers that he means hereafter to use 
 this term in the sense of effort towards steadiness (Sthiti) 
 of thought. And if it be asked what is meant by steadiness 
 or Sthiti, he declares that it means that state of the mind 
 when, free from all activity (Witti), it remains in its own 
 character, that is, unchanged. Such effort must be con- 
 tinuous or repeated, as implied by the term Abhy&sa (1, 13). 
 
 This Abhyasa is said to become firmly grounded, if 
 ractised for a long time thoroughly and unintermittingly 
 
 Dispassion, Vairagya. 
 
 Next follows the definition of dispassion (Vairagya), as 
 the consciousness of having overcome (the world) on the 
 part of one who has no longer any desire for any objects 
 whatsoever, whether visible or revealed (I, 15). 
 
 Here visible JJDrishta,) stands for percep^ble or sensuous 
 objects, while Anusravika may be translated by revealed, 
 as it is derived from Anu&rava, and this is identical with 
 $ruti or Veda. Perhaps Anusrava is more general than 
 
DISPASSION, VAIRAGYA. 339 
 
 Veda, including all tha.t has been handed down, such as the 
 stories about the happiness of the gods in paradise 
 (Devaloka), &c. The consciousness of having subdued or 
 overcome all such desires and being no longer the slave of 
 them, that, we are told, is Vairagya or dispassionateness, 
 and that is the highest point which the student of Yoga- 
 philosophy hopes to reach. 
 
 It is interesting to see how deeply this idea of Vairagya 
 or dispassionateness must have entered into the daily life 
 of the Hindus. It is constantly mentioned as the highest 
 excellence not for ascetics only, but for everybody. It 
 sometimes does not mean much more than what we mean 
 by the even and subdued temper of the true gentleman, but 
 it signifies also the highest unworldliness and a complete 
 surrender of all selfish desires. A very good description of 
 what Vairagya is or ought to be is preserved ta us in the 
 hundred verses ascribed to Bhartrihari (650 A.D.), which 
 are preceded by two other centuries of verses, one on 
 worldly wisdom and the other on love. Many of these 
 verses occur again and again in other works, and it is very 
 doubtful whether Bhartrihari was really the original 
 author of them all, or whether he only collected them aa 
 Subhashitas *. Anyhow they show how the philosophy of 
 Vairagya had leavened the popular mind of India at that 
 distant time, nor has* it ceased to do so to the_present day. 
 It was perhaps bold, after Bhartn'hari, to undertake a 
 similar collection of verses on the same subject. But as the 
 Vairagya-sataka of (?aina/carya seems in more recenir times 
 to* have acquired considerable popularity in India, a few 
 extracts from it may serve to show that the old teaching of 
 Pata>7</ali and Bhartrihari has not yet Been forgotten in 
 their native country. 
 
 ' Death follows man like a shadow, and pursues him like 
 an enemy ; perform, therefore, good deeds, so that you may 
 reap a blessing hereafter/ 
 
 ' Frequent enjoyment of earthly prosperity has led to your 
 sufferings. Pity it is that you have not tried the " Know 
 Yourself."' 
 
 1 His work is actually called Subhashita-trisati, see Report of Sanskrit 
 and Tamil MSS., 1896-97, by Seshagiri Sastri, p. 7. 
 
 Z 2 
 
34<> INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 ' Live in the world but be not of it, is the precept taught 
 by our old Kishis, and it is the only means of liberating 
 yourself from the world/ 
 
 ' The body is perishable and transitory, white the Self is 
 imperishable and everlasting ; it is connected with the body 
 only by the link of Karman ; it should riot be subservient 
 to it/ ' 
 
 * If, through sheer negligence, you do nothing good for 
 your fellow creatures, you will be your own enemy, and 
 become a victim to the miseries of this world/ 
 
 * Better to do less good, with purity of heart, than to do 
 more with jealousy, pride, malice, or fraud. Little, but 
 good and loving work, is always valuable, like a pure gem, 
 the essence of a drag, or pithy advice/ 
 
 'If you are unable to subject yourself physically to 
 penances, to undergo austerities, and engage in deep con- 
 templation, the proper course to liberate your soul from the 
 hard fetters of Karman would be to keep the passions of 
 your heart under control, to check your desires, to carry out 
 your secular affairs with calmness, to devote yourself to the 
 worship of God, and to realise in yourself the " Permanent 
 Truth," bearing in mind the transitory nature of the 
 universe/ 
 
 ' To control your mind, speech, and body, does not mean 
 to be thoughtless, silent or inactive, like beasts or trees ; 
 but, instead of thinking what is evil, speaking untruth, and 
 doing harm to others, mind, speech, and body should be 
 applied to good thoughts, good words, and good deeds/ 
 
 iMspassionateness, as here taught for practical purposes 
 chiefly, reaches its highest point in the eyes of the Yoga- 
 philosopher, when a man, after he has attained to the 
 knowledge of Purusha, has freed himself entirely from all 
 desire for the three Gunas (or their products). This is at 
 least what Pata/?</ali says in a somewhat obscure Sutra 
 (I, i j) \ This Svttra seems intended to describe the highest 
 state within reach of the true Vairagin, involving indiffer- 
 ence not only to visible and revealed objects, but likewise 
 towards the GuTias, that is, if I am not mistaken, the 
 
 1 Garbe, Grand riss, p. 49. 
 
MEDITATION WITH OR WITHOUT AN OBJECT. 34! 
 
 twenty-four Tattvas, here called Ckmas 1 , because deter^ 
 rained by them. The knowledge of the Purusha implies 
 the distinction between what is Purusha, the Self, and what 
 is not, and therefore also between Purusha and the GuTias 
 of Prakriti. Vigwana-Bhikshu explains i by Atmanat- 
 mavivekasakshatkarat, i. e. from realising the difference 
 between what is Self and what is not Self, arid not as 
 a possessive compound : the sense, however, remaining much 
 the same. It is curious that Rajendralal Mitra should have 
 rendered PurushakhyateA by c conducive to a knowledge of 
 God./ From a purely philosophical point of view Purusha 
 may be translated by God, but such a translation would be 
 misleading here, particularly as the Sutra 23, on the 
 devotion to the Lord, follows so soon after It would have 
 been better also to translate 'arising from,' than * conducive 
 to/ 
 
 Meditation Wftfe or Without ftn Object. 
 
 Patawgrali next proceeds (I, 17) to explain an important 
 distinction between the two kinds of meditative absorption 
 (Samadhi), which he calls Sampragr/lata and Asainpragwata. 
 This seems to mean that there is one kind of meditation 
 when our thoughts are directed and fixed on a definite 
 object, and another when there is no definite object of 
 meditation left. Here the spirit of minute distinction shows 
 itself once more, for though these two kinds of meditation 
 may well be kept apart, and the former be considered as 
 preliminary to the latter, the numerous subdivisions of 
 each hardly deserve our notice. We are told that what is 
 called conscious meditation may have for its object either 
 one or the other of the twenty-four Tattvas or the tsvara, 
 looked upon as one of the rurushas. The twenty- four 
 
 1 These Chinas are more fully described in II, 19, whero we read that 
 the four Gunas or Gunaparvani r meant for (i) Vi.esha, i.e. the gross 
 elements and the organs; (a) Avisesha, i.e. the subtle elements and the 
 mind ; (3) the Limgamatra, i.e. Buddhi ; (4) the Alitnga, i.e. Praknti as 
 Avyakta. In the commentary to I, 45, the same classes of Gunas are 
 described as Aliwga, a name of Pradhana, Yisishfeilimga, the gross elements 
 (Bhutan!) ; Avisish&litnga, he subtle essences and the senses; Limga- 
 matra, i.e. Buddhi, and Alimga, that is, the Pradhana. 
 
342 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Tattvas are called unconscious, the twenty -fifth or Purusna 
 is conscious. When meditation (Bhavana) has something 
 definite for its object it is called not only Pra#/?ata, known," 
 or, as referred to the subject, knowing, but also Savi^a, 
 literally with a seed, which I am inclined to take in the 
 sense of having some seed on which it can fix, and from 
 which it can develop. The Asampra^wata-samadhi, or 
 meditation without a known object, is called Avi</a, not 
 having a seed from which to spring or to expand. Native 
 Commentators, however, take a different view. 
 
 Those who in their Samadhi do not go beyond the 
 twenty-four Tattvas, without seeing the twenty-fifth, the 
 Purusha, but at all events identify themselves no longer 
 with the body^ are called Videhas, bodyless ; others who do 
 not see the Purusha yet, but only existence, are called 
 Prak?itilayas, absorbea in Prakriti. 
 
 This again is not quite clear to me, but it is hardly 
 necessary that we should enter into all the intricate sub- 
 divisions of the two kinds of meditation, such as Savitarka, 
 argumentatiYe, Savi&ara, deliberative, Sananda, joyous, and 
 Sasmita 1 , with false conceit. They may become important 
 in a more minute study of the Yoga, but they can hardly 
 be of interest to speculative philosophers except so far as 
 they furnish another proof of a long continued study of 
 the Yoga-philosophy in India before the actual composition 
 of the Sutras. 
 
 The Asampragwata-samadhi, or meditation without a 
 known object, or, it may be, unconscious meditation, is 
 explained as being preceded by a repetition of negative 
 perception, and as the end of all previous impressions. 
 I, 18. 
 
 This Sutra has been differently explained by different 
 European and native commentators. It may mean that 
 there is a residue of previous impressions, or that there is 
 not. The Samskaras, which I have rendered by previous 
 impressions, are everything that has given to the mind its 
 
 1 Asmita is different from. Anamk&ra, and means the misconception 
 that I am (Asm!) what I am not* such as Prakriti, Buddhi, Ahawkara, 
 Manas, &c. 
 
ISVAEA ONCE MORE. 343 
 
 peculiar character, its flavour, so to say, or its general dis- 
 position, 
 
 'Quo semel est imbuta recens servabit odorem 
 Testa diu.' 
 
 It may be intended that these Samskaras are either all 
 wiped out, or that there is but a small residue of them 
 manifested in the final act of the stopping all functions 
 of the mind. 
 
 In summing up what has been said about the different 
 kinds of Samadhi, Patarcgrali says (I, 19) once more that in 
 the case of the Videhas and Prak?*itilayas (as explained 
 before, p. 342) the object or, if you like, the cause of Samadhi 
 is the real world (Bhava), but that for other Yogins there 
 are preliminary conditions or steps to Samadhi, namely, 
 faith, energy, memory, concentration, and knowledge suc- 
 ceeding each other. Every one of these Samadhis is again 
 carefully defined, and some more helps are mentioned in 
 the next Sutra (I, 21), where we read that Samadhi may 
 be sa : d to be near or within reach when the zeal or the will 
 is strong. These strong-willed or determined aspirants are 
 again divided (I, 22) according as the means employed by 
 them are mild, moderate, or excessive. Thus we get nine 
 classes of Yogins, those who employ mild means, with mild, 
 with moderate, or with excessive zeal ; those who employ 
 moderate means, with mild, with moderate, or with excessive 
 zeal; and those who employ excessive means with mild, 
 with moderate, or with excessive zeal. 
 
 Such divisions and subdivisions which fully justify the 
 name of S&mkhya, enumeration, make both the S&mkhya- 
 and Yoga-philosophies extremely tedious, and I shall in 
 future dispense with them, though they may contain now 
 and then some interesting observations. 
 
 isvara Once More. 
 
 After an enumeration of all these means of Yoga to be 
 employed by the student, follows at last the famous Sfltra 
 I, 23, which has always been supposed to contain, in answer 
 to Kapila, the proof of the existence of a Deity, and which 
 I translated before by ' Devotion to the Lord/ The com- 
 
344 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 mentator calls it simply an easy expedient, an alternative. 
 Nor is it right, with Rajendralal Mitra, to translate this 
 Sutra at once by ' Devotion to (jfod/ Isvara, as we saw, 
 is not God in the sense in which Brahm& might be called 
 so. He is a God, the highest God, but always one o many 
 Purushas; and though he was looked upon as holy (I, 25) 
 and omniscient, he never seems to have risen to the rank 
 of a Creator; for which there is really no room in the 
 Sa??ikhya system. Though it is true, no doubt, that the 
 orthodox Yogins derived great comfort from this Sutra as 
 shielding Pata/vgfali against the charge of atheism, it would 
 be impossible to look upon it as a real proof in support 
 of the existence of God, or as more than a somewhat forced 
 confession of faith. 
 
 Other Means of Obtaining Sam&dhi. 
 
 The benefits arising from this devotion to the Lord are 
 not essentially different from those that are to be obtained 
 from other IJpayas or means of attaining Samadhi, as may 
 be seen from Siltras I, 29 to I, 33 translated bef ore* - Nor 
 is this devotion even the last or the highest Upaya, for 
 Patawgrali goes on immediately after to mention other means 
 equally conducive to concentrated meditation or absorption 
 in the thought of one object Expedients, such as the 
 expulsion and retention of the breath, follow next, the so- 
 called Praayamas, which we can well believe, may have 
 been really useful as contrivances to draw away the thoughts 
 from all subjects except the one chosen for meditation, 
 generally one of the Tattvas. But this opens far too large 
 a subject for our purpose in this place. We approach here 
 to the pathological portion of the Yoga, the so-called Ha ha, 
 or Kriya-yoga, a subject certainly far more important than 
 has generally been supposed, but a subject for students of 
 pathology rather than of philosophy, unless, as is now the 
 fashion, we include the so-called physico- psychological 
 experiments under the name of philosophy. One thing 
 may certainly be claimed for our Sfttras ; they are honest 
 in their statements as to the discipline that can be applied 
 to the mind through the body, and even if they could be 
 proved to have been mistaken in their observations, their 
 
OTHER MEANS OF OBTAINING SAMADHI. 345 
 
 illusions do not seem to me to have been mere frauds, at 
 least in the days of Patatfgali, though it is far from my 
 purpose to undertake a defence of all the doings and sayings 
 of modern Yogins or Mahatmans. 
 
 Next to the moderation or restraint of the breathing, 
 follow descriptions of how the mind, by being directed to 
 the tip of the nose, cognises a heavenly odour, and the samt, 
 with all the other senses, which therefore are supposed to 
 have no longer any inclination towards outward objects, 
 having everything they want in themselves. We are next 
 told of the perception of an inward luminous and blessed 
 state, which produces a steadiness and contentedness of the 
 mind when directed towards objects which no longer appeaj 
 to the passions (I, 37). No wonder that even objects seen in 
 dreams or in sleep are supposed to answer the same purpose, 
 that is, to fix the attention. In fact any object may be 
 chosen for steady meditation, such as the moon without, 
 or our heart within, provided always tlmt these objects do 
 not appeal to our passions. 
 
 All these are means towards an end, and there can be no 
 doubt that they have proved efficacious ; only, as so often 
 happens^ the means have evidently encroached in this case 
 also, on the aims, and to such an extent 'that Yoga has often 
 been understood to consist in these outward efforts rather 
 than in~ that concentration of thought which they were 
 meant to produce, and which was to lead on to Kaivalya 
 or spiritual separateness and freedom. This true Yoga is 
 often distinguished as R%a-yoga or royal Yoga from the 
 other called Kriy&-yoga or working Yoga, which is some- 
 times called HaAa-yoga, though it is not clear why. 
 Though some of these bodily exercises are represented 
 as serving as a kind of staircase on which the mind ascends 
 step by step, we are told at other times that any step may 
 be useful, and that some may be skipped or taken for passed. 
 
 Now, if *we ask what is the result of all this, we are told 
 in SiHra 41 that a man who has put an end to all the 
 motions and emotions of his mind, obtains with regard to 
 all objects of his senses conformation grounded in them 
 (sic), or steadiness and consubstantiation, the idea being 
 that the miind is actually modified or changed by the 
 
34 6 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 objects perceived (I, 41). As a crystal, when placed near 
 a red flower, becomes really red to our eyes, in the same 
 way the mind is supposed to become tinged by the objects 
 perceived. This impression remains true as grounded in 
 the object, and our mind should always be centred on one 
 object of meditation. 
 
 Having mentioned in a former Sfttra that Samadhi (here 
 called Samapatti) may be either Savitarka or Savi/cara, lie 
 now explains (I, 42) that when meditation is mixed with 
 uncertainties as to word, meaning, or knowledge, it is called 
 Savitarka. Thus, supposing that our meditation was cen- 
 tred on a cow, the question would be whether we should 
 meditate on the sound cow, Sk. Go, or on the meaning of 
 it (Begriff), that is the genus cow, or the idea or picture 
 (Vorstellung) conveyed by it. Such a meditation would 
 be called Savitarka. Its opposite is Nirvitarka when all 
 memory vanishes and the meaning alone, without any form, 
 remains, or, as the commentator puts it, though not much 
 more clearly, when the knowing mind (Pragwa), tinged 
 with the form of its object, forgets its own subjective* form 
 of knowing, and becomes, as it were, one in form with the 
 object. 
 
 After Samadhi, both Savitarka and Nirvitarka, has been 
 described, the next division is into Savi/cara and Nirvi/fcara. 
 They are defined as having reference to subtle objects 
 (I, 44), that is, to the Tanmatras, essences, and the senses, 
 and thus we learn that the former, the Savitarka Samadhi, 
 had to deal with material objects only. Subtle objects 
 include Prakriti also, and there is nothing subtle beyond 
 it, for the Purusha is neither subtle nor non-subtle. 
 
 If we look upon the Nirvi&ara Samadhi as the highest 
 of the Samadhis, then there would follow on the completion 
 of that meditation contentment or peace of the Self (Atman). 
 Knowledge in this state is called J&tambhara, right or 
 truth-bearing, quite different from the knowledge which is 
 acquired by inference or by revelation. And from this 
 knowledge springs a disposition which overcomes all former 
 dispositions and renders them superfluous. 
 
KAIVALYA, FREEDOM. 347 
 
 Sam&dhi Apragw&t&. 
 
 This knowledge therefore wotfld seem to be the highest 
 goal of the true Yogin ; but no, there is still something beyond 
 knowledge, and that is what was called before Apragwata 
 Samadhi, meditation without any object, or pure ecstasy. 
 This restores the Purusha to his own nature, after he has 
 been delivered from all the outside disturbances of life, and 
 particularly from the ignorance that caused him to identify 
 himself for awhile with any of the works of Prakriti 
 (Asmita). 
 
 Kaivalya, Freedom. 
 
 This short account of what is contained in the first 
 chapter of the Yoga- Sutras contains almost all that can 
 be of interest to European philosophers in the system of 
 Pata^alij and it is not impossible that it may have 
 originally formed a book complete in itself. It shows us 
 the whole drift of the Yoga in its simplest form, beginning 
 with the means of steadying and concentrating the mind 
 on certain things, and more-, particularly on the twenty- four 
 Tattvas, as taken over f rom the Samkhya, and leading on 
 to a description of meditation, no longer restricted to any 
 of the Tattvas, which is ta/ntamount to a meditation which 
 does not dwell on anythin.g that can be offered by an ideal 
 representation of what is (jailed the real world. It is really 
 meditation of each Purusha on himself only, as distinct 
 from all the Tattvas of F'rakriti. This is Kaivalya or the 
 highest bliss in the eyes of the true Yogin, and it may well 
 be called- the highest achievement of Gn ana-yoga, i. e. Yoga 
 carried on by thought or by the will alone. Outward 
 helps, such as the Praii&yama, the in- and out-breathing, 
 are just alluded to, but that is almost the only allusion to 
 what in later times came-, to be the most prominent part of 
 the practical or Rriya-yo-ga, namely, the postures and other 
 ascetic performances (Yogangas), supposed to prepare the 
 mind for its own higher efforts. The above-mentioned 
 Isvara-pranidhana, ' Devotion to the Lord/ is classed here 
 as simply one of the Yogangas or accessories of Yoga, 
 together with purification, contentment, penance, and 
 mumbling of prayers (II, 32), showing how little of real 
 
INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 philosophical importance was ascribed to it by Pataw^ali. 
 It helps towards Samadhi, meditation, it is a kind of wor- 
 ship (Bhakti-visesha) addressed to Bhagavat ; but that ia 
 all the commentator has to say in recommendation of it. 
 There is nothing to show that Pata#0ali imagined he had 
 thereby given a full and satisfactory answer to the most 
 momentous of all questions, the existence or non-existence 
 of an individual Creator or Ruler of the world, 
 
 It is quite possible that some of my readers will be 
 disappointed by my having suppressed fuller details about 
 these matters, but it seems to me that they really have 
 nothing to do with philosophy in the true sense of the 
 word ; and those who take an interest in them may easily 
 consult texts of which there exist English translations, such 
 as the second and third books of the Yoga-Sutras, and 
 better still the HaAaprayoga, translated by Shrinivas 
 Jyangar, Bombay, 1893; On the Vedantie Raj -Yoga, by 
 Sabhapati Sv&mi, edited by Siris Chandra Basu, Lahore, 
 1880; the Ghera?ida-samhita, Bombay, 1895, and several 
 more. There is also a very useful German translation by 
 H. Walter, * Svatmarama's HaAa-yoga-pradipika, Miinchen, 
 1893. 
 
 Yogangus, Kelps to Tog-a- 
 lt is true that considerable antiquity is claimed for some 
 of these Yogangas, or members cf Yoga. $iva himself is 
 reported to have been their author, and names such as 
 Vasish/ia and Ya$wavalkya are quoted as having described 
 and sanctioned eighty-four postures, while Gorakshanatha 
 reckoned their true number as 8,400,000 *. I take a few 
 specimens from Rajendralal Mitra's Yoga Aphorisms, p. 103 : 
 ' i. Padmasana. The right foot should be placed on the 
 left thigh, and the left foot on the right thigh ; the hands 
 should be crossed, and the two great toes should be firmly 
 held thereby ; the chin should be bent down on the chest, 
 and in this posture the eyes should be directed to the tip 
 of the nose. It is called Padmasana, lotus-seat, and ia 
 highly beneficial, in overcoming all diseases. 
 
 1 See Rajendralal Mitra, Yoga Aphorisms, p. 100. 
 
VIBHtfTIS, POWERS. 349 
 
 2. Vfrasana. Place each foot under the thigh of its 
 side, and it will produce the heroic posture Virasana. 
 
 3. Bhadrasana. Place the hands in the form of a tortoise 
 in front of the scrotum, and under the feet, and there is 
 Bhadrasana, fortunate-seat. 
 
 4. Svastikasana. Sitting straight with the feet placed 
 under the (opposite) thighs is called Svastikasana, cross 
 seat. 
 
 5. Da^dasana. Seated with the fingers grasping the 
 ankles brought together and with feet placed extended on 
 the legs, stick-seat/ 
 
 This will, I believe, be considered enougn and more than 
 enough, and I shall abstain from giving descriptions of the 
 Mudras (dispositions of upper limbs), of the Bandhas or 
 bindings, and of the rules regarding the age, sex, caste, food 
 and dwelling of the performer of Yoga. To most people 
 these minute regulations will seem utterly absurd. I do 
 not go quite so far, for some of these facts have, in a general 
 way, been recorded and verified so often that we can hardly 
 doubt that these postures and restraints of breathing, if 
 properly practised, are helpful in producing complete ab- 
 straction (Pratyahara) of the senses from their objects, and 
 a complete indifference of the Yogin towards pain and 
 pleasure, cold and heat, hunger and thirst \ This is what 
 is meant by the complete subjugation of the senses (Parama 
 vasyata indriyanam, II, 55) which it is the highest desire 
 of the Yogin to realise, and this not for its own sake, but 
 as an essential condition of perceiving the difference be- 
 tween the Purusha, the seer, and Prakriti, the spectacle, 
 Presented to Purusha through the agency of the Manas as 
 eveloped from Prakr^ti. Professional students of hypno- 
 tism would probably be able to account for many state- 
 ments of the followers of Kriya-yoga, which to a reader 
 without physiological knowledge seem simply absurd and 
 incredible. 
 
 Vibhfttis, Powers, 
 
 The third chapter of Pata^^ali's Yoga-Sutras is devoted 
 to a description of certain powers which were supposed to 
 
 1 Cf. N. C. Paul, Yoga-Philosophy. 
 
35O INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 be obtainable by the Yogin. They are called Vibhutis, or 
 simply Bhfttis, Mah&siddhis, JRiddhis, or Aisvaryas. Here 
 also we are able to watch the transition from rational be- 
 ginnings to irrational exaggerations, the same tendency 
 which led from intellectual to practical Yoga. That tran- 
 sition is clearly indicated in the Yogangas or accessories of 
 Yoga. In II, 29 we find eight of these accessories men- 
 tioned, viz. restraints (Yama), subduing (Niyama), postures 
 /Asana), regulation of breathing (Pr&Ti&y&ma), abstraction 
 (Pratyah&ra), firmness Dh&ra7i&), contemplation (Dhy&na), 
 and absorption (Sam&dhi), but in III, 4 three only are 
 chosen as constituting Samyama, firmness, namely DMran&, 
 Dhy&na, and Sam&dhi, the other five being treated as 
 merely outward helps. Dh&ra7i&, firmness in holding, is 
 explained (III, i) as the confinement of the Manas to one 
 place, and this place is said to be the tip of the nose, the 
 navel, the ether, the sky or some other place. By this all 
 other Vrittis or motions of the Manas are stopped, and the 
 mind can be kept fixed on one object. The next, Dhy&na, 
 is contemplation of the one object to the exclusion of all 
 others; while the third, real Sam&dhi, absorption, arises 
 when the mind, lost in its work, illuminates one object 
 only. This Sam&dhi, of which absorption or meditation ;is 
 a very poor rendering, is explained ctymologically as that 
 by which the mind, Samyag adhiyate, is thoroughly col- 
 lected and fixed on one point without any disturbing 
 causes (III, 3). 
 
 Sarwyama and SiddMs. 
 
 The Samyama, which comprises the three highest helps 
 to Yoga, is called internal (III, y) in contradistinction from 
 the other helps, but, in itself, it is still but an outside help 
 of the so-called objectless (Nirvigfa) state (III, 8). It is 
 difficult to find a word for Samyama, firm grasp being no 
 more than an approximative rendering. It is this Samyama, 
 however, which leads on to the Siddhis, or perfections. 
 These are at first by no means miraculous,' though they 
 become so afterwards, nor are they the last and highest 
 goal of Yoga-philosophy, as has often been supposed both 
 by Indian and by European scholars. Patay^ali, before 
 
SA-AfYAMA AND SIDDHIS. 351 
 
 explaining these Siddhis, endeavours to show that every 
 thing exists in three forms, as not yet, as now, and as no 
 more, and that it is possible from knowing one to know 
 the other states. Thus a jar is not yet, when it exists only 
 as clay ; it is now, when it is the visible jar, and it is no 
 more, when it has been broken up and reduced to dust 
 again. So in all things, it is said, the future may be known 
 from the present and the present accounted for by the past. 
 This is expressed by Pataw^ali in Sutra III, 1 6. So far all 
 is clear ; but it is difficult to see why Samyama is required 
 for this, and how it is to be applied to what is called the 
 threefold modification. Knowledge of the past from the 
 present, or of the future from the present, is hardly 
 miraculous yet; though, when we are told that a Yogin 
 by means of Samyama knows what is to come and what 
 is past, it sounds very much 'like a claim of the, gift of 
 prophecy, and certainly became so in time. The same 
 applies in a still higher degree to the achievements by 
 means of Samyama claimed by the Yogins in the following 
 Sutrr 3. Here (III, 1 7) because a man has learned to under- 
 stand the meanings and percepts indicated by words,, a 
 Yogin by applying Sa?7iyama to this gift, is supposed to be 
 able to understand the language of birds and other'animals. 
 In fact we get more and more into superstitions, by no 
 means without parallels in other countries, but for all that, 
 superstitions which have little claim on the attention of 
 the philosopher, however interesting they may appear to 
 the pathologist. Then follow other miraculous gifts all 
 ascribed to Samyama, such as a knowledge of former 
 existences, a knowledge of another's mind, or thought- 
 reading, though not of the merely casual objects of his 
 thoughts, a power of making oneself invisible, a fore- 
 knowledge of one's death, sometimes indicated by portents. 
 By Sa?)iyama with respect to kindness, a man may make 
 himself beloved by everybody. This is again natural, but 
 soon after we are landed once more in the supernatural, 
 when we are told that he may acquire the strength of an 
 elephant, may see things invisible to ordinary eyes, may, 
 by meditating on the sun, acquire a knowledge of geography, 
 by meditating on the moon, a knowledge of astronomy, by* 
 
352 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 meditating on the Polar star, a knowledge of the move- 
 ments of the heavenly bodies, and by meditating on the 
 navel, a knowledge of anatomy. He may actually suppress 
 the feelings of hunger and thirst, he may acquire firmness, 
 see heavenly visions, in fact know everything, if only he 
 can bring his will or his Samyama to bear on the things 
 'which produce such effects. More of these Siddhis are 
 mentioned from IV, 38 to 49, such as the soul entering 
 another body; ascension to the sky, effulgence, unlimited 
 hearing, lightness like that of cotton, conquest of all elements, 
 conquest of the organs, conquest of time, omniscience, &c. 
 These matters, though trivial, could not be passed over, 
 whether we accept them as mere hallucinations to which, 
 as we know, our senses and our thinking organ are liable, 
 or whether ^e try to account for them in any other way. 
 They form an essential part of the Yoga-philosophy, and 
 it is certainly noteworthy, even from a philosophical point 
 of view, that we find such vague and incredible statements 
 side by side with specimens of the most exact reasoning 
 and careful observation. 
 
 Miraclas. 
 
 In reading the accounts of the miracles performed by 
 Yogins in' India we have in fact the same feeling of wonder- 
 ment which we have in reading of the miracles performed 
 by the Neo-platonists in Alexandria. The same writer 
 who can enter into the most abstruse questions of philosophy l 
 will tell us with perfect good faith how he saw -his master 
 sitting in the air so many feet above the ground. One 
 instance of the miracles supposed to have been wrought 
 by a Yogin in India must suffice. A writer with whom 
 I have been in correspondence, the author of a short life of 
 his teacher, Sabhapati Svamy, born in Madras in 1840, 
 relates not only visions which the young student had 
 these might be accounted for like other visions but miracles 
 which he performed in the presence of many people. We 
 are told that it was in the twenty-ninth year of his age 
 that SabhapatS, thirsting for Brahmag^&na or knowledge 
 
 * M. M., Theogophy, Loot. xiii. 
 
MIRACLES. 353 
 
 of Brahman, had a vision of the Infinite Spirit, who said 
 .to him : ' Know, O Sabhapati, that I the Infinite Spirit am 
 in all creations, and all the creations are in me. You are 
 not separate from me, neither is any soul distinct from me : 
 I reveal this directly to you, because I see that you are 
 holy and sincere. I accept you as my disciple, and bid you 
 rise and go to the Agastya Asrama, where you will find 
 me. in the shape of Rishis and Yogins.' After that, in the 
 dead of the night, for it was one o'clock in the morning 
 when he saw the divine vision, Sabhapati left his wife and 
 two sons, went out of his house and travelled all the night 
 till he reached the temple of Mahadeva, also called Vedasrewi- 
 Svayambhu-sthalam, seven miles from Madras. There he 
 sat for three days and three nights immured in deep con- 
 templation, and was again commanded in a vision to pro- 
 ceed to the Agastya Asrama. After many perils he at last 
 reached that Asrama and found there, in a large cave, a 
 great Yogin, two hundred years old, his face benign and 
 shining with divinity. The Yogin had been expecting him 
 ever unce Mahadeva had commanded him to proceed to 
 the Agastya Asrama. He became his pupil, acquired 
 Brahmac/nana and practised Samdhi till he could sit 
 several days without any food. After seven years his 
 Guru dismissed him with words that sound strange in the 
 mouth of a miracle-monger: 'Go, my son, and try to do 
 good to the world by revealing the truths which thou hast 
 learned from me. Be liberal in imparting the truths that 
 should benefit the Grihasthas^ (householders). But beware 
 lest thy vanity or the importunity of the world lead thee 
 to perform miracles and show wonders to the profane.' 
 Sabhapati seems afterwards to have taught in some of the 
 principal cities and to have published several books, de- 
 clining, however, to perform any miracles. In 1880 he 
 was still living at Lahore. But though he himself declined 
 to perform any of the ordinary miracles, he has left us an 
 account of ajniracle performed by one of the former members 
 of his own Asrama. About 1 80 years ago a Yogin passed 
 through Mysore and visited the Rajah who received him 
 with great reverence and hospitality. Meanwhile the 
 Nabob of Arcot paid a visit to Mysore, and they all went 
 
 33 Aa 
 
354 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 with the Yogin to his Asrama. The Nabob, being a Mussul- 
 man, asked: ' What power have you that you arrogate to 
 yourself divine honour, and what have you that you call 
 yourselves divine persons ? ; A Yogin answered, ' Yes, we 
 possess the full divine power to do all that God can do '; 
 and the Yogin took a stick, gave divine power to it, and 
 threw it in the sky. The stick was transformed into 
 millions of arrows, and cut down the branches of the fruit 
 trees to pieces, thunder began to roar in the air, and 
 lightning began to flash, a deep darkness spread over the 
 land, clouds overcast the sky, and rain began to fall in 
 torrents. Destruction was impending ; and in the midst of 
 this conflict of the elements, the voice of the Yogin was 
 heard to say: 'If I give more power, the world will be 
 in ruins/ The people implored the Yogin to calm this 
 universal havoc. He willed, and the tempest and the 
 thunder, and the rain and the wind, and the fire and all 
 were stopped, and the sky was as serene and calm as ever V 
 I do not say that the evidence here adduced would pass 
 muster in a Court of Law. All that strikes me in it is the 
 simplicity with which everything is told, and the unhesitat- 
 ing conviction on the part of those who relate all this. Of 
 course, we know that such things as the miracle here 
 related are impossible, but it seems almost as ^reat a miracle 
 in human nature that such things should ever have been 
 believed, and should still continue to be believed. This 
 belief in miracles evidently began with small beginnings, 
 with what Pata/?#ali describes as a foretelling of the future 
 by a knowledge of the present or the past. What could 
 be foretold might soon be accepted as the work of the 
 prophet who foretold it, and from prophecy even of re-4 
 current events, there is but a step to prophesying other; 
 events also, whether wished for, feared, or expected. Pro-f 
 phets would soon begin to outbid prophets, and the small 
 ball of superstition would roll on rapidly till it became the 
 avalanche which we know it to be, and to have been at all 
 times and in all countries. 
 
 1 Om, a treatise on Vedantic Raj Yoga Philosophy, by the Mahatma 
 Giana Guroo Yogi Sabhapati Sovarni, edited by Siris Chandra Basil, 
 Student, Government College, Lahore, 1880. 
 
 - - 
 
TBUE YOGA. 355 
 
 Apart from that, however, we, must also remember that 
 the influence of the mind on the body and of the body on, 
 the mind is as yet but half explored ; a:nd in India and 
 among the Yogins we certainly meet, particularly in more 
 modern times, with many indications that hypnotic states 
 are produced by artificial means and interpreted as <lue to 
 an interference of supernatural powers in the events of 
 ordinary life. But all ,tihis is beyond our proving^, how- 
 ever interesting it may be to modern psychologists, and it 
 was only in order to guard against being supposed to be 
 un Willing even to listen! to the statements of those who 
 believe in Kriyayoga thajb. 1 have given so much space to 
 what I cannot help considering as self-deception, leading, in 
 many cases to a systematic deception of others. 
 
 Yoga, in its early stages, knew little or nothing of all 
 this. It was truly philosophical, and the chief object it had 
 in view was to realise the distinction between the ex- 
 periencer and the experienced, or as we should call it, 
 between] subject and object. We are told again and again 
 that out ordinary, though false, experience arises from our 
 not distinguishing between these two heterogeneous factors 
 of our consciousness, and Yoga, when perfect, represented 
 the achievement of this distinction, the separation or de- 
 liverance of the, subject from all that is or ever was ob- 
 jective in him ; the truth being that the Purusha never can 
 be the immediate experience!? or pereeiver of pain or 
 pleasure, but can only see them as being reflected on the 
 Manas or mind, this 'mind not being, in truth, his, the 
 Purusha's, but simply the working of Prakriti, the ever 
 objective. In enumerating the means by which this dis- 
 tinction can be realised, Pata//</ali always gives the prefer- 
 ence to efforts of thought over those of the flesh. If he 
 does not discard the latter altogether, we ought to remember 
 that only by practical experiments o.ould we possibly gain 
 the right to reject them altogether. 
 
 _ _ 
 
 True Yogra. 
 
 But though Pata/jgrali allows all these postures and 
 tortures as steps towards reaching complete abstraction 
 and concentration of thought, he never forgets his highest 
 
 A a I 
 
 
356 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 object, nay he allows that all the Siddhis, or miraculous 
 powers, claimed by the Yogins, are useless and may even 
 become hindrances (III, 37) in the career of the true aspirant 
 after Viveka, distinction, Moksha, freedom, and Kaivalya, 
 aloneness. One sometimes doubts whether all the Sutras 
 can really be the work of one and the same mind. Thus 
 Awhile in the course of Pataw#ali's speculations, we could 
 not but give him credit for never trying to locate the mind 
 or the act of perceiving and conceiving in the brain, or in 
 something like the pineal gland, we find him suddenly in 
 III, 34, claiming the muscle of the heart as the seat of the 
 consciousness of thought (Hridaye .Krttasaravit). While 
 the human body as such is always regarded as dark and as 
 unclean, so that the Yogin shrinks from contact with his 
 own, much more from contact with other bodies, we are 
 suddenly told (III, 46) that by Samyama or restraint, 
 colour, loveliness, strength and adamantine firmness may be 
 gained for the body. 
 
 However, the general drift of the Yoga remains always 
 the same, it is to serve as a Taraka (III, 54), as a ferry, 
 across the ocean of the world, as a light by which to 
 recognise the true independence of the subject from any 
 object; and -as a preparation for this, it is to serve as 
 a discipline for subduing all the passions arising from 
 worldly surroundings. In the last Sutra of the third book, 
 Patawgrali sums up what he has said by a pregnant sentence 
 (EH, 55) : ' Kaivalya (aloneness) is achieved when both the 
 mind and the Self have obtained the same purity/ This 
 requires some explanation. Instead of Mind, Patatfgrali 
 says simply Sattva, which the commentator renders by 
 jfifittasattva, and defines as the entering of thought (Kiit&) 
 into its own causal form, after the removal of the miscon- 
 ception of activity. This seems not quite exact, for if we 
 took Sattva as the Guna Sattva, we should be told that 
 a Guna cannot have a cause, while the Manas has a cause, 
 and is to be reabsorbed into its cause or causes (Ahawk&ra, 
 Buddhi, Prakriti), as soon as its Guwa, here the Sattva, has 
 become perfectly $anta or quieted. 
 
SAJfSKARAS AND VASANAS. 357 
 
 The Three Gunas. 
 
 I have tried to explain the meaning of the three Gunas 
 before, but I am bound to confess that their nature is by 
 no means clear to me, while, unfortunately, to Indian 
 philosophers they seem to be so clear as to require no 
 explanation at all. We are always told that the thre3 
 Gunas are not qualities, but something substantial (Dra- 
 vya?u). In everything that springs from nature, and there- 
 fore in the Manas also, there are these three Gwi/as (IV, 15) 
 striving for mastery 1 . Sattva of the mind is goodness, 
 light, joy, and its purification means its not being overcome 
 by the other two Gunas of Ra^as, passion, or Tamas, 
 darkness (II, 47). From this purification springs first 
 Saumanasya, serenity, from this Ekagrata, concentration, 
 from this Inc^riyagraya, subjugation of the organs of sense, 
 and from this at last Atmadarsanayogyata, fitness for 
 beholding the Self, or in the case of the Purusha, fitness for 
 beholding himself, which is the same as Kaivalya, aloneness. 
 
 In the fourth and last chapter Pata/tgrali. recurs once 
 more to the Siddhis, perfections, natural or miraculous, 
 and tells us that they may be due not only to Samadhi, 
 meditation in its various forms, but also to birth, to drugs, 
 to incantations, and to heat (Tapas) or ardour of asceti- 
 cism, &e. By birth is meant not only birth in this or in 
 a future life, as a Brahman or $iidra, but also rebirth, such 
 as when Nandfsvara, a Brahman, became a Deva, or when 
 Visvamitra, from being a Kshatriya, became by penance 
 a Brahman. This is accounted for as being 'simply a re- 
 moval of hindrances, as when a husbandman, wishing to 
 irrigate his field, pierces the balk of earth that kept the 
 water from flowing in. 
 
 Samsk&ras and Vasanas. 
 
 Though, as a rule, whatever a man does has its results, 
 whether good or bad, the act of a Yogin, we are told, is 
 
 1 Yath4rthas trigunas tatha fcittam api trigunam, 'As the object is 
 /hreefold, the thought also is threefold/ The mind in fact is doubly 
 ilfected by the Gunas, first as'having them or being them, then as being 
 inged once more by the Gunas of the objects perceived (IV, 16). 
 
358 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 neither black nor white, it" produces no fruit, because it is 
 performed without any desire. 
 
 As the results of actions we have Vasanas, impressions, 
 or Samskaras, dispositions. They show themselves either 
 in what remains, often dormant, and is then called memory 1 , 
 or in the peculiar genus, of man, bird, cow, Brahman or 
 jS'&dra, in the locality and in the time when a man is born. 
 These remainders never cease, so that the animal pro- 
 pensities may lie dormant for a time in a Brahman, but 
 break out again when he enters on a canine birth. They 
 are not said to be without beginning, because desires and 
 fears can only arise when there are objects to be feared or 
 desired (IV, 10). Impressions are caused by perceptions, 
 perceptions spring from desire, desire from nescience. The 
 result of them all is the body with its instincts, their habitat 
 the mind, their support, or that on which they lean, the 
 same as the support of perception, i. e. the objective world. 
 Hence it is said that they sprout, like seeds, but that by 
 Knowledge and Yoga they can be annihilated also like 
 seeds, when roasted. In connexion with this the question is 
 discussed, how anything can ever be completely destroyed, 
 how what exists can be made not to exist, and how what 
 does not exist can be made to exist. I doubt, however, 
 whether Rajendralal Mitra can be right (III, 9> IV, 12) 
 when he discovers here something like the theory of ideas 
 or logoi in the mind of Pataw^ali, and holds that the three 
 ways or Adhvans in which objects present themselves to 
 the mind, or affect the mind, as past, present and future, 
 correspond to the admission of universalia ante rem, the 
 ideas or types, the universalia in re, the essence, and the 
 universalia post rem, the concepts in our minds. I confess 
 I hardly understand his meaning. It should never be for- 
 gotten tnat the mind is taken by Pata/?#ali as by itself 
 unconscious (not as Svabhasa, self-illuminated, IV, 18) and 
 as becoming conscious and intelligent for a time only by the 
 union between it and the Purusha, who is pure intelligence. 
 The Manas only receives the consciousness of perception 
 which comes in reality from the Purusha, so that here we 
 
 1 This kind of memory comes very near to what we call instinct, 
 propensity, or untaught ability. 
 
IS TOGA NIHILISM? 359 
 
 should have the etymological, though somewhat fancifill, 
 definition of consciousness (con-scientia) as well as of the 
 Sanskrit Sara- vid, i.e. knowing along with the mind, i.e. 
 apprehending the impressions of the mind (Svabuddhi- 
 Sa?nvedanam). But though .Kitta is the work of the 
 Manas, not directly of the Buddhi, this ^fitta, when seen 
 by the seer (Purusha) on one side and tinged with what is 
 seen on the other, may be spoken of as the thought of the 
 Purusha, though it is so by a temporary misconception 
 only. This JTitta again is coloured by many former im- 
 pressions (Vasana). It may be called the highest form of 
 Prakriti, and as such it serves no purpose of its own, but 
 works really for another, the Purusha, whom it binds and 
 fascinates for a *time with the sole purpose, we are told, of 
 bringing him back to a final recognition of his true Self 
 (IV, 24). 
 
 Kaivalya, 
 
 If that is once achieved, the Purusha knows that he 
 hims3lf is not experiencer, neither knower nor actor ; and 
 the Manas or active mind, when beginning to feel the 
 approach of Kaivalya, turns more and more inward and 
 away from the world, so as not to interfere with the 
 obtainment of the highest bliss of the Purusha. Yet there 
 is always danger of a relapse in unguarded moments or in 
 the intervals of meditation. Old impressions may reassert 
 themselves, and the mind may lose its steadiness, unless 
 the old Yoga-remedies are used again and again to remove 
 all impediments. Then at last, perfect discrimination is re- 
 warded by what is called by a strange term, Dharmamegha, 
 the cloud of virtue, knowledge and virtue being inseparable 
 like cause and effect. All works and all sufferings have 
 now ceased, even what is to be known becomes smaller and 
 smaller, the very Grnias, i. e. Prakriti, having done their 
 work, cease troubling^ Purusha becomes himself, is in- 
 dependent, undisturbed f ree, and blessed. 
 
 Is Yogra Nihilism? 
 
 This is the end of the Yoga-philosophy, and no wonder 
 that it should have been mistaken for complete nihilism by 
 
 
360 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Cousin and others. But first of all, the play of Prakriti,- 
 though it has ceased for our Purusha, who has gained true 
 knowledge, is supposed to be going on for ever for the 
 benefit of other innumerable Purushas ; and as long as ? 
 there are any spectators, the spectacle of Prakrit! will 
 never cease. Secondly, the Purusha, though freed from 
 iUusion, is -not thereby annihilated. He is himself, apart 
 from nature, and it is possible, though it is not distinctly ' 
 stated, that the Purusha in his aloneness may continue his 
 life, like the Givanmukta of the Vedanta, maintaining his 
 freedom among a crowd of slaves, without any fear or hope 
 of another Jife, unchanged himself in this ever-changing 
 Samsara. However, we need not attempt to supply what 
 Pataw^ali himself has passed over in silence. The final 
 goal whether of the Yoga, or of the Sa/mkhya, nay even of 
 the Vedanta and of Buddhism, always defies description. 
 Nirvana in its highest sense is a name and a thought, but 
 nothing can be predicated of it. It is ' what no eye has 
 seen and what has not entered into the mind of man/ We 
 know that it is ; but no one can say what it is, and !>hose 
 who attempt to do so are apt to reduce it to a mere 
 phantasmagoria or to a nothing. 
 
 Though I hope that the foregoing sketch may give 
 a correct idea of the general tendency of the Yoga- 
 philosophy, I know but too well that there are several 
 points which require further elucidation, and on which 
 even native expositors hold different opinions. What we 
 must guard against in all these studies is rejecting as 
 absurd whatever we cannot understand at once, or what to 
 us seems fanciful or irrational. . I know from iny own 
 experience how often what seemed to me for a long time 
 unmeaning, nay absurd^ Disclosed after a time a far deeper 
 meaning than I should .ever have expected. 
 
 The great multitude of technical tertaas, though it may be 
 bewildering to us, could not be entirely suppressed, because 
 it helps to show through how long and continuous a 
 development these Indian systems of thought must have 
 passed, before any attempt was made, as it was by Pataw- 
 <yali and others, to reduce them to systematic order. There 
 remains with me a strong conviction that Indian philoso- 
 
IS TOGA NIHILISM? 361 
 
 phers are honest in their reasonings, and never use empty 
 words. But there remains much to be done, and I can only 
 hope that if others follow in my footsteps, they will in time 
 make these old bones to live again. These ancient sages 
 should become fellow-workers and fellow -explorers with 
 ourselves in unknown continents of thought, and we ought 
 not to be afraid to follow in their track. They alway^ 
 have the courage of their convictions, they shrink from no 
 consequences if they follow inevitably from their own 
 premisses; This is the reason why I doubt whether the 
 aamissiorr of an Isvara or lord by Patawgali, in contra- 
 distinction to Kapila who denies that there are any argu- 
 ments in support of such a being, should be put down as 
 a mere economy or as an accommodation to popular opinion. 
 Indian philosophers are truthful, and Patatfgrali (II, 36) says 
 in so many words that truth is better than sacrifice l . They 
 may err, as Plato has erred and even Kant, but they are 
 not decepti deceptores, they do not deceive or persuade 
 themselves, nor do they try to deceive others. 
 
 1 Satyapratishtoayam kriyaphalasrayatvat. 
 
OdY BI 
 
 id van bits c 8gaino&B9i iiedd fii desnorl eus aiedq 
 
 ? )ns <sfiob ad oi ilonm aniBinoi sierfd duS .ebiow 
 
 ii wollol eiQifdo ii ddd oqorf. 
 
 KiofoflB : /if od sailed bio aaadd a^Lem 
 
 /[low-woliol emoood bli/odg 
 
 i nworahm ni aevloaiuo 
 
 CHAPTEE VIII. o,t brail* od od don 
 
 on mo 1 /} vl; to e^Biuoo add ev.Bff. 
 
 NTAYA AND VAISESHIE^ ^ 8aon9ITp98flOC> 
 
 >rdT .aeeaimaiq 
 
 Relation between Ny&ya and MbL^. iQ ^I^urnbj^ 
 
 -jjjgi;-. [j&JT p| noidomdaib 
 
 WHILE in the systems hitherto examined, ^ pfq^Acularlyrfaj 
 the Ved^nta, Samkhya, and Yoga, there runa a strong i 
 religious and even poetical vein, ye now ; corhe )bo two 
 systems, Nyaya and Vaiseshika, which ar^ vey dry and 
 unimaginative, and much more like what we mean by 
 scholastic systems of philosophy, businesslike expositions 
 of what can be known, either of the world which surrounds 
 us or of the world within, that is, of our faculties or powers 
 of perceiving, conceiving, or reasoning on one side, $rid the 
 objects which they present to us, on the other. 
 
 It should be remembered that, like the Samkhya and 
 Yoga, and to a certain extent like the Pflrva and Uttara- 
 Mim&rasa, the Ny&ya and Vaiseshika also have by the 
 Hindus themselves been treated as forming but one disci- 
 pline. We possess indeed a separate body of Ny&ya-Sfttras 
 and another of Vaiseshika-Sfttras, and these with their 
 reputed auth6rs, Gotania and KaTiada, have long been 
 accepted as the original sources whence these two streams 
 of toe ancient philosophy of India proceeded. But we 
 know now that the literary style which sprang up naturally 
 in what I called the Sfttra-period, th3 period to which the 
 first attempts at a written, in place of a purely mnemonic, 
 literature may have to be ascribed, was by no means 
 restricted to that ancient period, but continued to be so well 
 imitated in later times that we find it used with great 
 success not only in the S&mkhya-Sfttras, which are later 
 than M&dhava (1350 A.D.), but in more modern compositions 
 also. It shoula always be borne in mind that the Sfttras 
 ascribed to Gotama and KaTi&da presuppose a long previous 
 
EELATTQN BETWEEN NYAYA AND VALSESHIKA. 363 
 
 development of philosophical thought, and instead of 
 regarding the' two as two independent streams, it seems 
 far more likely that there existed at first an as yet un- 
 differentiated body of half philosophical half popular 
 thought^ bearing on things that can be known, the Padar- 
 thas, i.e. omne scibile, and on the means of acquiring such 
 knowledge, from which at a later time, according to the 
 preponderance of either the one or the other subject, the 
 two systems of Yaiseshika and Nyaya branched off. These 
 two systems shared of course many things in common, and 
 hence we can well understand that at. a later time they 
 should have been drawn together again and treated as one, 
 as we see in /Sivaditya's Saptapadarthi (about 1400 A.D.), in 
 the Bhasha-Pari&Meda, with its commentary the Muktavali, 
 in the Tarkasamgraha, the Tarkakauinudi, the Tarkamrita, 
 &c. For practical purposes it is certainly preferable that 
 we should follow their example and thus avoid the necessity 
 of discussing the same subjects twice over. There may 
 have been an old Tarka, very like our Tarkasamgraha, the 
 one before the bifurcation of the old system of Anvikshiki, 
 the other after the confluence of the two. But these are as 
 yet conjectures only, and may have to remain mere con- 
 jectures always, so that, in the present state of our know- 
 ledge, and depending, as we have to do, chiefly on the 
 existing Sutras as the authorities recognised in India itself, 
 we must not attempt a historical treatment, but treat each 
 system by itself in spite of unavoidable repetitions. 
 
 A very zealous native scholar, Mahadeo Rajaram Bodas, 
 in the Introduction to his edition of the Tarkasamgraha, 
 has indeed promised to give us some kind of history of the 
 Ny&ya-philosophy in India. But unfortunately that period 
 in the historical development of the Nyaya which is of 
 greatest interest to ourselves, namely that which preceded 
 the composition of the Ny&ya-Sutras, had by him also to 
 be left a blank, for the simple reason that nothing is known 
 of Ny&ya before Gotamit. The i later periods, however, 
 have been extremely well treated by Mr. feodas, and I may 
 refer my readers to him for the best information' on the 
 subject. Mr. Bodas places ths Sfttras of Qofcama and 
 Ka?iada in the fifth or fourth cent. B. c. ; and he expresses 
 
364 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 a belief that the Vaiseshika, nay even the Samkhya, as 
 systems of thought, were anterior to Buddha, without how- 
 ever adducing any new or certain proofs. 
 
 MgaAg*. 
 
 Dates are the weak points in the literary history of 
 India, and, in the present state of our studies, any date, 
 however late, should be welcome. In former years to assign 
 the Kapila-Sutras to the fourteenth or even fifteenth 
 century A.D., would have seemed downright heresy. Was 
 not K&lidsa himself assigned to a period long before the 
 beginning of our era? It seems now generally accepted 
 that Kalidasa really belonged to the sixth century A.D., and 
 this date of Kalidasa may help us to a date for the Sfttras 
 of Gotama, valuable to us, though it may be despised by 
 those who imagine that the value of Sanskrit literature 
 depends chiefly on its supposed remote antiquity. I have 
 pointed out 1 that, according to native interpreters, Kalidasa 
 alluded to the logician Dignaga in a verse of 'his Megha- 
 duta 2 . We may suppose therefore that Dignaga was 
 considered a contemporary of Kalidasa. Now Dign&ga is 
 said by Va&aspati Misra, in his Nyaya- v&rttika-tatparya- 
 tfika, to have interpreted the Nyaya aphorisms of Gotarna 
 in a heterodox or Buddhist sense, while Uddyotakara wrote 
 his commentary to refute his interpretation and to restore 
 that of Pakshilasvamin. If Va/caspati Misra is right, we 
 should be allowed to place Dignaga in the sixth century, 
 and assign the same or rather an earlier date to the Sutras 
 of Gotama, as explained by him and other Nyaya philo- 
 sophers. So late a date may not seem to be worth much, 
 still I think it is worth having. Several other dates may 
 be fixed by means of that of Dignaga as I tried to show in 
 the passage quoted above (India, pp. 307 seq.). 
 
 A more comprehensive study of Buddhist literature may 
 possibly shed some more light on the chronology of the 
 later literature of the Brahmans, if I am right in supposing 
 that in the beginning the followers of Buddha broke by no 
 
 1 India, p. 307. 
 
 2 See also Prof. Satis Chandra Vidyablbrushana in Journal of Buddhist 
 Text Society, IV, parts iii, and iv, p. 16. 
 

 365 
 
 means so entirely, as has generally been supposed, with the 
 literary traditions of the Brahmans. It is quite intelligible 
 ^rhy among the various systems of Hindu philosophy the 
 Buddhists should have paid little attention to the two 
 Mimamsas, concerned as they both were with the Veda, 
 an authority which the Buddhists had rejected. But there 
 was no reason why the Buddhists should forswear the 
 study of either the Nyaya or Vaiseshika systems, or even 
 the Samkhya system, though making their reserves on 
 certain points, such as the existence of an Isvara, which 
 was admitted by the Nyayas, but % denied by Buddha. We 
 know that at the court of Harsha, Brahmans, Bauddhas, 
 and Crainas were equally welcome (India, pp. 307 seq.). 
 We know from Chinese travellers such as Hiouen-thsang 
 that Vasubandha, for instance, before he became a Buddhist, 
 had read with his master, Vinayabhadra or Samghabhadra l , 
 not only the books of the eighteen schools which were 
 Buddhist, but also the six Tirthya philosophies, clearly 
 meant for the six Brahmanic systems of philosophy. This 
 Vasubandha, as a very old. man, was actually the teacher 
 of Hiouen-thsang, who travelled in India from 629 to 
 648 A.D. Therefore in Vasubandha's time all the six 
 systems of Indian philosophy must have been in existence, 
 in the form of Sutras or Karikas. For we possess, in one 
 case at least, a commentary by Pakshila-svamin or Vatsya- 
 yana on the Nyaya-SMras, the same as those which we 
 possess, and we know that the same Sutras were explained 
 afterwards by Dignaga, the Buddhist. This Buddhist 
 commentary was attacked by Uddyotakara, a Brahman, of 
 the sixth century, while in the beginning of the seventh 
 century Dharmakirtti, a Buddhist, is said to have defended 
 Dignaga 2 and to have criticised Uddyotakara's Nyaya- 
 varttika. In the ninth century Dharmottara, a Buddhist, 
 defended Dharmakirtti's and indirectly Dignaga's inter- 
 pretation of the Nyaya-Sfttras, and it was not till the tenth 
 
 1 See also Journal of Buddhist Text Society, 1896, p. 16. 
 
 2 Though none of Dignaga's writings have as yet been discovered, Sri 
 Sarat Chandra states that there is in the library of the Grand Lama 
 a Tibetan translation of his Nyaya-samu&fcaya (Journal of Buddhist Text 
 Society, part iii, 1896, p. 17). 
 
366 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 century that Va/i'aspati Misra finally re-established the 
 Br&hmanie view of the Nyaya in his Nyaya- varttika- 
 tatparya-ilka. This would coincide with *the period of 
 the Brahmanfe reaction and the general collapse of Bud- 
 dhism in India, and thus place before us an intelligible 
 progress in the study of the .Nyaya both by Brahmans and 
 Buddhists from the sixth to the tenth century, while the 
 revival of the Nyaya dates from Gamgesa Upadhyaya who 
 lived in the fourteenth century at Mithila. 
 
 Thanks to the labours of Sarat Chandra Das and Satis 
 Chandra YidyabhftshaTia, we have lately gained access to 
 some of the Sfttras of the Buddhist schools of philosophy, 
 which are full of interest. Of the four great schools of 
 the Buddhists, the Madhyamika, YogaMra, Sautrantika, 
 and Vaibhashika, the first or Madhyamika now lies before 
 us in the Madhyamika Vritti by jfiTandra-Kirtti, and there 
 is every hope that other philosophical treatises also, for 
 instance, the Nyaya-samu&/caya, may be made 4ccessible to 
 us by the labours of these indefatigable scholars. 
 
 The S&tras or rather K&rikas of the Madhyamika .school 
 must, of course, be distinguished from the system of thought 
 which they are meant to explain. The characteristic feature 
 of that system is the $unya-vada, or nihilism, pure and 
 simple. As such it is referred to and refuted in Gotama's 
 Nyaya- Sutras IV, 37 to 40, in Kapila ; s Samkhya-Sutras I, 
 43, 44, in Badarayawa's Vedanta-Sutras II, % 28, where 
 $amkara distinctly refers the doctrine- that We know no 
 objects, but only our perceptions of them, tc> Sugata or 
 Buddha. The author or the Pa/z&adasi quotes tli& Madhya- 
 mikas by name as the teachers of universal nihilism (Sarvam 
 
 . 
 
 If Nagargruna was really ttye author of the Madhyamika- 
 Sfttras, as we now possess tbfem, they would carry us backi 
 to about the first century A.!\, and we should have in his' 
 Karikas, as explained by -STandra-KiVtti, the oldest docu- 
 ment of systematic philosophy in India, which will require 
 very careful examination. Though it is different, no doubt, 
 from all the six systems, it nevertheless shares in common 
 with them many of the ideas and even technical terms. If 
 it teaches the $flnyatva or emptiness of t^he world, this after 
 
DIGNAGA. 
 30JIH1 
 
 367 
 
 all is not very different from the Vedantic Avidya, and the 
 Samkhya Aviveka, andl if n it teaches the Pratityatva of 
 everything, that need be no more than the dependence of 
 everything 'to something else 1 . The <fistinetion made by 
 the Madhywiikas between what is Paramarthika, real in 
 the highest sense, and Sam vritika, veiled, is much the same 
 as the distinction of the later Ved&nta between what 'i* 
 really real* (Param&rthataA), and what is Vyavaharika, 
 phenomena! or the result of Maya, sometimes called 
 Samvrity the veil that covers the NirgUTia Brahman or 
 the Tad,'<tv^hich again is not very different from what the 
 ; BuMt|fetk^ Vacant originally by /Sftnya, empty, for they 
 Hold that even the /Sftnya is not altogether nothing. Many 
 o the ^luiical terms used by the M&dhyamikas are the 
 same as ttose with which we are acquainted in the other 
 systems. Bu&kha, pain, for instance, is divided A into 
 ^Ldhyatinik^- intrinsic, Adhibhautika, extrinsic, and Adhi- 
 d&lvika> ! divine or supernatural. We meet with the five 
 perceptions of colour, taste, smell, touch, and sound, and 
 five causes, light, water, earth, air, and ether, 
 sw4 the well-known idea that Manas, mind, 
 
 to the Buddhists 
 is that>t6 thrill neither the objects of sense nor the sensations 
 ^iD&to an -^iderlying substance or reality. 
 " W%^OWe ft ;i gi*eat debt of gratitude to both Sarat Chandra 
 Das and /Sri Satis Chandra Vidy&bhushami for their labours 
 in Tib^fc, ^tnd we look forward to many valuable contribu- 
 tions from their pen/ more particularly for retranslations 
 from Tibetan. 
 
 Whether Buddhist philosophy shares more in common 
 with the Sirakhya than with the Ny ay a and Vaiseshika 
 seems to me as doubtful as ever. The fundamental position 
 of the Samkhya, as Satkaryavada, is the very opposite of 
 the Buddhist view of the world. 
 -rhiB ai d -bio. R.r 
 
 1 PratTtya in Pratitya-samutpada and similar words may best be 
 rendered by depea4nt or conditioned. A son, for instance, is a son, 
 Pitaram Pratitya, dependent on a father, and a father is impossible 
 without assort*. I$,!the sama way everything is dependent on 
 
 . : 
 
 w ni a>! 
 
368 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Bibliography. 
 
 It was in 1852 that I published my first contributions 
 to a study of Indian philosophy in the Zeitschrift der Deut- 
 schen Morgenld^dischen Gesellschaft. These papers did not 
 extend, however, beyond the Vaiseshika and Nyaya-philo- 
 sophy as treated in the Tarkasamgraha, and more urgent 
 occupations connected with the edition of the Rig-veda 
 prevented me ; at the time from finishing what I had pre- 
 pared for publication on the other systems of Indian 
 philosophy. Though, of course, much new and important 
 material has come to light in the meantime, particularly 
 through the publications of the Vaiseshika-Sutras in the 
 Sibliotheca Indica, through the complete translation of 
 them' by A. E. Gough, 1873, an( ^ through the comprehen- 
 sive researches of European scholars, such as Professoirs 
 Deussen and Garbe, I found that there was not much to alter 
 in my old account of Gotama's and Kawada's philosophies, 
 as given in the German Oriental Journal, and in my paper 
 on Indian Logic contributed to the late Archbishop Thom- 
 son's Laws of Thought. Indian philosophy has this great 
 advantage that each tenet is laid down in, the Sutras with 
 the utmost precision, so that there can be little doubt as 
 to what KaTiada or Gotama thought about the nature of 
 the soul, the reality of human knowledge, the relation 
 between cause and effect, the meaning of creation, and the 
 relation between God or the Supreme Being and man. 
 Thus it may be understood why even papers published so 
 long ago as 1824, such as J. Colebrooke's papers on the 
 Nyaya and Vaiseshika and the other systems of Indian 
 philosophy, may still be recommended to all who want 
 trustworthy information on Indian philosophy. These 
 essays have sometimes been called antiquated, but there 
 is a great difference between what is old and what is anti- 
 quated. The difficulty in giving an account of these 
 systems for the benefit of European readers consists far 
 more in deciding what may be safely omitted, so as to 
 bring out the salient points of each system, than in re- 
 capitulating all their tenets. 
 
 Books in which the Nyaya and Vaiseshika-systems may 
 
NYAYA-PHILOSOPHY. 369 
 
 be studied by those who are unacquainted with Sanskrit 
 are, besides the papers of Colebrooke : 
 
 Ballantyne, The Aphorisms of the Ny&ya-Philosophy 
 by Gautama. Sanskrit and English, Allahabad, 1 850. (Gau~ 
 tarna is the same as Gotama, only that by a tacit agreement 
 Gotama has generally been used as the name of the philo- 
 sopher, Gautama as that of Buddha, both belonging, it 
 would seem, to the family of the Gautamas or Gotamas, 
 the MSS. varying with regard to the vowel.) 
 
 A.. E. Gough, The Vaiseshika Aphorisms of Kauada, 
 translated, Benares, 1873. 
 
 Manilal Nabubhai Dvivedi, The Tarka-Kaumudt, being 
 an introduction to fch* principles of the Vaiseshika and 
 Nyaya-philosophies by Laugaksbi Bh&skara, Bombay, 1886. 
 This is the same author to whom we owe a valuable edition 
 of the Yogas*ara-sa / mgraha. 
 
 Windisch, Uber das Nyaya-bhashya, Leipzig, s. a. 
 
 Kesava $astri, The Nyaya-darsana with the commentary 
 of Vatsyayana, in the Pundit, 1877, pp. 60, 109, 311, 363 
 (incomplete) ; see also Bibliothtca Indica. 
 
 Mahadeo Rajaram Bodas, The Tarkasamgraha of Annam- 
 bha^a, with the author's Dipika and Govardhana's Nyaya- 
 bodbini, ^prepared by the late Rao Bahadur Yasavanta 
 Vasadeo Athalya, and published with critical and explana- 
 tory notes, Bombay, 1897. This book reached me after 
 these chapters on the Nyaya and Vaiseshika were written, 
 but not too late to enable me to profit by several of his 
 explanations and criticisms, before they were printed. 
 
 Though Nyya has always been translated by logic, we 
 must not imagine that the Nyaya-Sutras are anything like 
 our treatises on formal logic. There is, no doubt, a greater 
 amount of space allowed to logical questions in these than 
 in any of the other systems of Indian philosophy , but 
 originally the name of Nyaya would have been quite as 
 applicable to the Piirva-Miraamsa, which is actually called 
 Nyaya in such works, for instance, as Sayana's Nyaya- 
 maia-vistara, published by Goldst ticker, Nor is logic 
 the sole or chief end of Gotama's philosophy. Its chief 
 
 24 Bb 
 
370 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 end, like thai of the other Darsanas, is salvation, the 
 summum bonum which is promised to all. This summum 
 bonum is called by Gotama NiAsreyasa, literally that which 
 has nothing better, the non plus ultra of blessedness. This 
 blessedness, acco^-ding to the ancient commentator. Vatsy&- 
 yana, is described as consisting in renunciation with regard 
 tp all the pleasures of this life, and in the non-acceptance 
 of, or indifference to any rewards in the life to come ; as 
 being in fact what Brahman is, without fear, without 
 desire, without decay, and without death. Even this 
 Brahmahood must not be an object of desire, for such 
 desire would at once produce a kind of bondage, and 
 prevent that perfect freedom from all fear or hope, which 
 is to follow by itself, but should never be yearned for. 
 This perfect state of freedom, or resignation, can, according 
 to Gotama, be realised in one way only, namely, by know- 
 ledge, and in this case, by a knowledge of the sixteen great 
 topics of the Nyaya-philosophy 
 
 Summum Bonum. 
 
 In this respect all the six systems of philosophy are 
 alike, they always promise to their followers or their 
 believers the attainment of the highest bliss that can be 
 obtained by man. The approaches leading to that bliss 
 vary, and the character also of the promised bliss is not 
 always the same ; yet in each of the six systems philosophy 
 is recommended r^ot, as with us, for the sake of knowledge, 
 but for the highest purpose that man can strive after in 
 this life, that is, his own salvation. 
 
 We saw that the Vedanta recognised true salvation or 
 Moksha in the knowledge of Brahman, which knowledge 
 is tantamount to identity with Brahman. This Brahman 
 or God is, as the Upariishads already declare, invisible, and 
 far beyond the reach of the ordinary faculties of our mind. 
 But he can be learnt from revelation as contained in the 
 Veda, and as $vetaketu was taught ' Tat tvam asi,' ' Thou 
 art it, 1 every Vedantist is to learn in the end the same 
 lesson, and to realise his identity with Brahman, as the 
 fulfilment of all desires, and the surcease of all suffering 
 (DuAkhanta). 
 
SUMMUM BONUM. 371 
 
 The end of all suffering is likewise the- object of the 
 Samkhya-philosophy, though it is to be reached by a dif- 
 ferent road. Kapila, being a dualist, admits an objective 
 substratum by the side of a subjective spirit or rather 
 spirits, and he sees the cause of all suffering in the spirits' 
 identifying themselves with what is purely objective or 
 material. He therefore recognises the tnie means of 
 destroying all bondage and regaining perfect freedom of 
 the spirit in our distinguishing clearly between spirit and 
 matter, between subject and object, between Purusha and 
 Prakriti. Kaivalya, or aloneness, is the right name for 
 that highest state of bliss which is promised to us by the 
 Samkhya-philosophy. 
 
 The Yoga-philosophy holds much the same view of the 
 soul recovering its freedom, .but it insists strongly on 
 certain spiritual exercises by which the soul may best 
 obtain and maintain peace and quietness, and thus free 
 itself effectually from the illusions and sufferings of life. 
 It also lays great stress on devotion to a Spirit, supreme 
 among all the other spirits, whose very existence, according 
 to Kapila, cannot be established by any of the recognised 
 means of real knowledge, the Pramawas. 
 
 Of the two Mlmawsas we have seen already that the 
 Brahma-Mtma/msa or the Vedanta recognises salvation as 
 due to knowledge of the Brahman, which knowledge pro- 
 duces at once the recognition of oneself as in reality Brah- 
 man (Brahmavid Brahma eva bhavati, 'He who knows 
 Brahman is Brahman indeed'). It is curious to observe 
 tliat, while the Samkhya insists on a distinction between 
 Purushas, the subjects, and Prakriti, all that is objective, 
 as the only means of final beatitude, the Vedanta on the 
 contrary postulates the surrendering of all distinction be- 
 tween the Self and the world, and between the Self and 
 Brahman as the right means of Moksha. The roads 
 are different, but the point reached at last is much tjhe 
 same. 
 
 The other Mimamsa, that of Craimini, diverges widely 
 from that of Badarayawa. It lays its chief stress on works 
 (Karman) and their right performance, and holds that 
 salvation may be obtained through the performance of 
 
 B b 2 
 
372 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 such works, if only they are performed without any deuire 
 of rewards, whether on earth or in heaven. 
 
 Lastly, the Nyaya and Yaiseshika systems, though they 
 also aim at salvation, are satisfied with pointing out the 
 means of it as consisting in correct knowledge:, such as can 
 only be obtained from a clear apprehension of the sixteen 
 topics treated by Gotama, or the six or seven categories 
 put forward by Ka/n&da. These two philosophies, agreeing 
 as they do among themselves, seem to me to differ very 
 characteristically from all the others in so far as thev 
 admit of nothing invisible or transcendent (Avyakta), 
 whether corresponding to Brahman or to Prakriti. They 
 are satisfied with teaching that the soul is different from 
 the body, and they think that, if this belief in the body 
 as our own is once surrendered, our sufferings, which 
 always reach us through the body, will cease by them- 
 selves. 
 
 But while we can understand that each of the six 
 systems of Indian philosophy may succeed in removing 
 pain, it is very difficult to see in what that actual nappi- 
 ness was supposed to consist which remained after that 
 removal. 
 
 The Vedarita speaks of Ananda, or bliss, that resides in 
 the highest Brahman ; but the happiness to be enjoyed by 
 the souls near the throne of Brahman, and in a' kind of 
 paradise, is not considered as final, but is assigned to 
 a lower class only. That paradise has no attraction, and 
 would give no real satisfaction to those who have reached 
 the knowledge of the Highest Brahman. Their blissful 
 knowledge is described as oneness with Braliman, but no 
 details are added. The bliss held out by the Samkhyas 
 also is very vague and indefinite. It can arise only from 
 the Purusha himself, if left entirely to himself, far from all 
 the illusions and disturbances arising from objective nature, 
 or the works of Prakriti. 
 
 Lastly, the Apavarga (bliss) of the Ny&ya and Vaise- 
 shika systems seems entirely negative, and produced simply 
 by the removal of false knowledge. Even the different 
 names given to the supreme bliss promised by each system 
 of philosophy tell us very little. Mukti and Moksha mean 
 
MEANS OP SALVATION. 373 
 
 deliverance, Kaivalya, isolation or detachment, Nitareyasa, 
 non plus ultra, Amrita, immortality, Apavarga, delivery. 
 Nor does the well-known Buddhist term Nirvana help us 
 much. We know indeed from PaTiini (VIII, 3, 50) that 
 the word was pre-Buddhistic and existed in his time. He 
 tells us that, if used in the sense of ' blown out/ the right 
 form would be Nirvata/^, such as Nirvato vataA, ' the wind 
 has ceased to blow/ but Nirva/fto *gr"dk, 'the fire is gone 
 out/ We cannot prove, however, that NirvaTia was used 
 as the technical term for the summum bonum in PaTiini's 
 time, and it does not seem to occur in the classical Upani- 
 shads. Its occurring as the title of one of the modern 
 [Jpanishads makes it all the more likely that it was 
 borrowed there from Buddhistic sources. There is one 
 passage only, in the shorter text of the Maitreya * Upani- 
 shad where Nirvar^am anusasanam occurs, possibly meant 
 for Nirvananusasanam, the teaching of NirvaTia. What 
 should be clearly understood is that in the early Buddhistic 
 writings also, Nirvana does not yet mean a complete blow- 
 ing oat of the individual soul, but rather the blowing out 
 and subsiding of all human passions and the peace and 
 quietness which result from it. The meaning of complete 
 annihilation was a later and purely philosophical meaning 
 attached to Nirvana, and no one certainly could form an 
 idea of what that NirvaTia was meant to be in the Buddhist 
 Nihilistic or $ftnyata-philosophy, I doubt even whether 
 the Upanishads could have given us a description of what 
 they conceived their highest Mukti or perfect freedom to 
 be. In fact they confess themselves (Taitt. Up. II, 4, i) that 
 ' all speech turns away from the bliss of Brahman, unable 
 to reach it V an( i when language fails, thought is not likely 
 to fare better. 
 
 Means of Salvation. 
 
 Turning now to the means by which the Nyaya-philo- 
 sophy undertakes to secure the attainment of the summum 
 
 1 Sacred Books* of the East, XV, p. 61. 
 
 2 See a very learned article on Nirvana by Professor Satis Chandra 
 Vidyabhushana in the Journal of the Buddhist Text Society, VI, 
 part i, p. 33. 
 
374 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 bonum or Apavarga, we find them enumerated in the 
 following list : 
 
 The Sixteen Topics or Padarthas. 
 
 (j) Prama/n/a, raeans of knowledge; (2) Prameya, objects 
 of knowledge ; (3) Samsaya, doubt ; (4) Prayo#ana, pur- 
 pose ; (5). Dr/shianta, instance ; (6) SiddMnta, established 
 truth; (7) Avayava, premisses; (8) Tarka, reasoning; (9) 
 Nirnaya, conclusion ; ( 10) Vada, argumentation ; (i i) Galpa, 
 sophistry; (12) VitaraZa, wrangling, cavilling; (13) Hetva- 
 bhasa, fallacies; (14) IfAala, quibbles; (15) (?ati, false 
 analogies; (16) Nigrahasthana, unfitness for arguing. 
 
 This may seem a very strange list of the topics to be 
 treated by any philosophy, particularly by one that claims 
 . the title of Nyaya or logic. It is clear that in reality 
 the chapters on Pramawa or means of knowledge, and 
 Prameya. objects of knowledge, comprehend the whole of 
 philosophy. 
 
 Means of Knowledge. 
 
 The four PramaTias, according to Gotama, are Pratyaksha, 
 sensuous perception, Anumaiia, inference, Upamana, com- 
 parison, and $abda, word. 
 
 Perception 1 comes first, because inference can only begin 
 to do its work after perception has prepared the way, and 
 has supplied the material to which inference can be applied. 
 Comparison is no more than a subordinate kind of inference, 
 while the /Sabda or the word, particularly that of the Veda, 
 depends again, as we should say, on a previous inference 
 by which the authority of the word, more particularly the 
 revealed word, has first been established. Imperfect as this 
 analysis of our instruments of knowledge may seem, it 
 seems to me highly Creditable to Indian philosophers that 
 they should have understood the necessity of such an 
 analysis on the very threshold of any system of philosophy. 
 How^many misunderstandings might have been avoided if 
 all philosophers had recognised the necessity of such a# 
 introductory chapter. If we must depend for all our know- 
 ledge, first on our senses, then on our combinatory and 
 reasoning faculties, the question whether revelation falls 
 
OBJECTS OF KNOWLEDGE. 375 
 
 under the one or the other, or whether it can claim an* 
 independent authority, can far more easily be settled 
 than if such questions are not asked in limine, but turn 
 up casually whenever transcendental problems come to be 
 treated. 
 
 Objects of Knowledge. 
 
 The objects of knowledge, as given by the Nyaya, com- 
 prehend omne scibile, such as body, soul, organs of sense, 
 qualities, cognition, mind, will, fault, death, enjoyment, pain, 
 and final freedom. These objects are afterwards discussed 
 singly, but have of course little to do with logic. Doubt 
 and purpose mark the first steps towards philosophical dis- 
 cussion, instances and established ' truths s apply materials, 
 while premisses and reasoning lead on to the conclusion 
 which disputants wish to reach. From Nos. 10 to 16, we 
 have rules for dialectic rather than for logic. We are taught 
 how to meet the artifices of our antagonists in a long argu- 
 mentation, how to avoid or to resist sophistry, wrangling, 
 fallacies, quibbles, false analogies, and downright mis- 
 statements, in fact, how to defend^ truth against unfair 
 antagonists. 
 
 If from our point-ef^yiew we deny the name of logic to 
 such problems, we should be perfectly justified, though 
 a glance at the history of Greek philosophy would show 
 us that, before logic became an independent branch of 
 philosophy it was likewise mixed up with dialectic and 
 with questions of some more special interest, the treatment 
 of w r hich led gradually to the elaboration of general rules 
 of thought, applicable to all reasoning, whatever its subject 
 may be. 
 
 It is quite clear that these sixteen topics should on no 
 account be rendered, as they mostly have been, by the six- 
 teen categories. Categories are the praedicabilia, or 
 whatever can be predicated, and however much the mean- 
 ing of this term may have been varied by European philo- 
 sophers, it could never have been so far extended as to 
 include wrangling, fallacies, quibbles and all the rest. We 
 shall see that the six 'or seven Padarthas o the Vaise- 
 shikas correspond far more nearly to the categories of the 
 
376 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Aristotelian and afterwards of European philosophy in 
 general 
 
 PadArth*. Object. 
 
 Nothing shows so well the philosophical character of 
 the Sanskrit language as this very word Padartha, which 
 has been translated by category. It means in ordinary 
 Sanskrit simply a thing, but literally it meant Irtha, the 
 meaning, the object, Pada, of a word. What we should 
 call objects of thought, they called far more truly objects 
 of words, thus showing that from the earliest times they 
 understood that no thought was possible except in a word, 
 and that the objects of our knowledge became possible 
 only after they had been named. Their language passed 
 through an opposite process to that of Latin. Latin called 
 every kind of knowledge or all known things gnomina, 
 from g)nosco, to know ; but after a time, and after the 
 initial g had been dropped, as we drop it involuntarily in 
 gnat, their gnomiifia became nomina, and were then sup- 
 posed to be something different from the old and forgotten 
 gnomina ; they became nomina, i. e. mere names. 
 
 Six Fadfcrthas of Vaiieshika. 
 
 According to the Vaiseshikas, we have six Padarthas, 
 i. e. six general meanings, categories or predicates, to which 
 all words i.e. all things can be referred. All known things 
 must be either substances (9), qualities (24), or motions, 
 the last meaning, however, more than mere local move- 
 ment, so as to correvspond in fact to our activity or even 
 to our becoming (Werden). Knowledge (Buddhi) is here 
 treated as one of the qualities of the soul, which itself is 
 one of the substances, so that many things which with us 
 belong to psychology and logic, are treated by the v^aise- 
 shikas under this head. 
 
 The next two, the general and the particular, com- 
 prehend what is shared in common by many objects, and 
 what is peculiar to one, and thus distinguishes it from all 
 others. 
 
 Samavaya or intimate connection is a very useful name 
 for a, connection between things which cannot exist one 
 
MADHAVA'S ACCOUNT OF NYAYA. 377 
 
 without the other, such as cause and effect, parts and the 
 whole, and the like. It comes very near to the Avina- 
 bhava, i.e. the Not- without-being, and should be carefully 
 distinguished from mere conjunction or succession. 
 
 The seventh category, Abhava, or negation, was added, 
 it would seem, at a later time, and can be applied to previous, 
 to present or to subsequent non-existence, or even to absolute 
 Abhava. 
 
 Hadhava's Account of Nyaya. 
 
 In order to see what, in the eyes of native scholars, the 
 Nyaya-philosophy was meant to achieve, it may be useful 
 to look at an account of it given by the great Madhava- 
 fcarya in his Sarvadarsana-samgraha, the compendium of 
 all the systems of philosophy. * The Nyaya-sastra/ he says, 
 'consists of five books, and each book contains two daily 
 portions or Ahnikas. In the first Ahnika of the first book 
 the venerable Gotama discusses the definitions of nine 
 subjects, beginning with "proof" (PramaTia), and in the 
 second those of the remaining seven, beginning with dis- 
 cussion (Vada). In the first daily portion of the second 
 book he examines doubt (8), discusses the four kinds of 
 proof, and refutes all objections that could be made against' 
 their being considered as instruments of right knowledge ; 
 and in the second he shows that " presumption " and other 
 PramaTias are really included in the four kinds of " proof " 
 already given. In the first daily portion of the third book 
 he examines the soul, the body, the senses, and their 
 objects ; in the second, " understanding " (Buddhi) and mind 
 (Manas). In the first daily portion of the fourth book he 
 examines activity (Pravr^tti), faults (Dosha), transmigra- 
 tion (Pretyabhava), fruit or reward (Phala), pain (DuAkha), 
 and final liberation (Apavarga) ; in the second he investi- 
 gates the truth as to the causes of the " faults," and also 
 the subject of "wholes" and "parts." In the first daily 
 portion of the fifth book he discusses the various kinds of 
 futility (frati), and in the second the various kinds of 
 objectionable proceedings (Nigrahasthana) ' 
 
 After having held out in the first Sfttra the promise of 
 eternal salvation to all who studv his philosophy properly, 
 
INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Gotama proceeds at once to a description of the steps by 
 which the promised NiAsreyasa, or highest happiness, is to 
 be attained, namely by the successive annihilation of false 
 knowledge, of faults, of activity, and, in consequence, of 
 birth and suffering. When the last or suffering has been 
 annihilated there follows ipso facto freedom, or blessedness 
 (Apavarga), literally abstersion or purification. This pro- 
 cess reminds us strongly of some of the links in the Pai/c&a 
 Samuppada of the Buddhists. This is generally translated 
 by Chain of Causation, and was meant to sum up the causes 
 of existence or of misery, the twelve Nidanas. It really 
 means origin resting on something else. The first step is 
 Avidya or that cosmic Nescience which was so fully elabo- 
 rated in the Vedanta-philosophy. According to the Bud- 
 dhists there follow on Avidy& the Samkharas 1 , all the 
 varieties 'of existence; on these Vigrvv ana, sensation ; on this 
 Namanlpa, names and 'forms; on these the Shad&yatana, 
 the six organs of perception. Then follow in succession 
 Sparsa, contact, Vedan&, sensation, Trislma, desire, Upa- 
 dana, attachment, Bhava, state of existence, Cr&ti, birth, 
 (raramaraTia, decay and death, $oka, sorrow, Parideva, 
 lamentation, DuAkha, suffering, Daurmanasya, grief, and 
 Upaysisa, despair 2 . 
 
 This chain of successive states proclaimed by Buddha 
 has formed the subject of ever so many commentaries, none 
 of which seems quite satisfactory. The chain of Gotaina 
 is shorter than that of Gautama, but the general likeness 
 can hardly be mistaken. Who was the earlier of the two, 
 Gotama or Gautama, is still a contested question, but what- 
 ever the age of our Sutras (the sixteen topics) may be, 
 a Nyaya-philosophy existed clearly before the rise of Bud- 
 dhism. 
 
 Z. Praxnana. 
 
 Gotama proceeds next to examine each of the sixteen 
 topics. 
 
 The first topic or Padartha is Pramarta, which is said to 
 consist of four kinds, all being means or measures of know- 
 
 1 Cf. Garbe, SAwkhya-Philosophie, p. 269 seq. 
 
 2 Cf. Childers, s.v. 
 
INlnlRBNCE OR ANUMANA. 379 
 
 ledge. They are in the Ny&ya as in the Vaiseshika, (i) 
 Pratyaksha, sense-perception ; (2) Anumana, inference ; (3) 
 Upamana, comparison ; and (4) Sabda, word. 
 
 Perception or Pratyaksha. 
 
 1. Perception (Pratyaksha) is explained as knowledge 
 produced by actual contact between an organ of sense and 
 its corresponding object, this object being supposed to be 
 real. How a mere passive impression, supposing the con- 
 tiguity of the organs of sense with outward objects had 
 once been established, can be changed into a sensation or 
 into a presentation (Vorstellung), or what used to be 
 called a material idea, is a question not even asked by 
 Gotama. 
 
 Inference or Anumana. 
 
 2. Inference (Anumana), preceded by perception, is 
 described as of three kinds, Purvavat, proceeding from 
 what was before, i.e. <an antecedent; $eshavat, proceeding 
 from, what was after, i.e. a consequent; and Samanyato 
 Drish^a, proceeding from what is constantly seen together. 
 Though, as we saw, Jfarvaka rejects, every kind of Anu- 
 mana or inference, he., as Va/caspati* Misra remarks very 
 
 s acutely (Karika 5), in attacking his antagonists for their 
 mistaken faith in inference, does really himself rely on 
 inference, without which he could not so much as sur- 
 mise that his antagonists held erroneous opinions, such 
 erroneous opinions being never brought into contact with 
 his organs of sense, but being supposed to exist on the 
 strength of Anumana. 
 
 The meaning of the three kinds of inference differs Con- 
 siderably according to different commentators. It is 
 generally explained that a Purvavat, preceded by or 
 possessed of a prius, refers to the mutual relation between 
 a sign and what is signified by it, so that the observation 
 of the sign leads to the observation or rather inference of 
 what is universally .associated with it or marked by it. 
 This unconditional association is afterwards treated under 
 the name of Vyapti, literally pervasion of one thing by 
 another. Examples will make this clearer. When we see 
 
380 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 a river rising we infer as its Purva or prius that it has* 
 rained. When we see that the ants carry their eggs, or 
 that the peacocks are screaming, we infer as the $esha or 
 posterior that it will rain (Nyaya S. II, 5, 37). It is true 
 that in all these cases the reason given for an inference 
 may, as it is called, wander away, that is, rnay prove too 
 much or too little. In that case the fault arises from the 
 conditioned character of the Vy&pti or the pervasion. 
 Thus the rising of a river may be due to its having been 
 dammed up, the carrying off their eggs by the ants may 
 have been caused by some accidental disturbance of their 
 hill, and the screaming of the peacocks may really have 
 been imitated by men. The fault, however, in such cases 
 does not affect the process of inference, but the Vyapti 
 only; and as soon as the relation between the sign and 
 the thing signified has been rectified, the inference will 
 come right. Each Vy&pti, that is each inductive truth, 
 consists of a sign (Linga), and the bearer of a sign (Lingin). 
 The bearer of the sign is called Vyapaka or pervading, 
 the sign itself Vy&pya, what is to be pervaded. ~Thus 
 smoke is the sign (Linga, Vyapya), and fire is what per- 
 vades the smoke, is always present when there is smoke, is 
 the sine qud non of smoke, is therefore Lingin or Vyapaka. 
 
 But everything depends on whether the two are either 
 absolutely or only conditionally related. These conditions 
 are called the Upadhis. Thus the relation between fire and 
 smoke is conditioned by damp firewood; and there are 
 other cases also where fire exists without smoke, as in 
 a red-hot iron ball. 
 
 The third kind of inference, the S&mginyato Dr?sha, 
 based on what is constantly seen together, is illustrated 
 by our inferring that the sun is moving because it is seen 
 in different places, everything that is seen in different 
 places being known to have moved. Here the Vyapti, on 
 which the ancient logicians depended, had to wait till it 
 was corrected by Copernicus. 
 
 Even a deaf man may infer the existence of sound if 
 he sees a particular conjunction of a drumstick with a drum. 
 It requires but a certain amount of experience to infer the 
 presence of an ichneumon from seeing: an excited snake, or 
 
INFERENCE OE ANUMANA. 381 
 
 to infer fire from perceiving the heat of water, nay to infer 
 the existence of an organ of touch from our feeling any 
 animated body. In all such cases the correctness of the 
 inference is one thing, the truth of the conclusion quite 
 another, the latter being always conditioned by the presence 
 or absence of certain Upadhis. 
 
 Different from this very natural explanation of the three 
 kinds of Anumana is another, according to which $esha is 
 not supposed to mean subsequent effect, allowing us to 
 infer its invariable cause, but is to be taken in the sense of 
 what is left. This is illustrated by an example, such as 
 e Earth is different from all other elements, because it alone 
 possesses the quality of smell/ that is to say, earth is left 
 over, being separated from all other elements by its 
 peculiar quality of smell. One might have inferred from 
 the fact that the element of earth possesses smell, that all 
 elements possessed the same. But this is wrong, because 
 it is Aprasakta, i. e. does not apply. It would be no better 
 than if we were to infer that smell must belong to other 
 qualities and actions also, which would be simply absurd. 
 But as earth is different from all other substances, we may 
 infer that smell does not belong to anything that is not 
 earth, except artificially, as in scented articles. This is the 
 residuary inference, or method of residues. 
 
 In the same manner we are told that Purva, the prius, 
 should not be taken in the sense of antecedent cause, but 
 as a general concept the properties uf which have been 
 formerly comprehended as known. Thus from smoke on 
 a hill we should infer the presence of a particular fire on 
 the hill, falling under the general concept of fire as belong- 
 ing to the genus fire. 
 
 The third, or Samanyato DHshtfa, inference, is illustrated 
 by our inferring the existence of senses, which are by 
 themselves imperceptible (Indriya/m Atindriya??-i). because 
 we do perceive colour &c., and as no actions nan take place 
 without instruments we may infer the existence of senses 
 as instruments for our action of seeing, &e. Samanyato 
 Drishta, thus becomes very like the seeing of a general 
 concept. It is inference from the sensible to the super- 
 sensible. 
 
382 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 With all respect for native commentators, both ancient 
 and modern, I must confess that I prefer the more natural 
 explanation of the three kinds of inference being based on 
 cause, effect, and association, nay I find it difficult to under- 
 stand why this view should have been given up by the 
 modern Naiyayikas. 
 
 Among these three inferences, the first and last are called 
 Vita or straightforward, the second Avita, or not straight- 
 forward ; but this only if we adopt the second explanation 
 of the three kinds of Anum&na. 
 
 We shall have to deal again with Anum&na when we 
 come to consider the seventh Padartha, the Avayavas 
 or Premisses, or what we should call the members of a 
 syllogism. 
 
 Comparison or Upaxnana. 
 
 3. Next follows Comparison (Upamana) or recognition 
 of likeness, explained as an instrument for ascertaining 
 what has to be ascertained by means of similarity with 
 something well known before. For instance, having been 
 told that a Gavaya (bos gavaeus) is like a cow, and seeing 
 an animal like a cow, but not a cow, a man may infer that 
 it is a Gavaya. 
 
 Word or &abda. 
 
 4. Word (/Sabda) is explained either as a precept; of one 
 worthy to be trusted, or as a right precept. It refers, we 
 are told, either to visible or invisible objects^ It is curious 
 to see that among the people to be trusted (Apta) A the com- 
 mentator should mention not only Rishis and Aryas, but 
 Mle/c/c//as or barbarians also, provided they are well in- 
 formed. Strictly speaking the Veda would not come under 
 Sabda, unless it can be proved to be Aptava&ana, the word 
 of one worthy to be trusted. 
 
 XX. Prameya. 
 
 The second Padartha or topic is Prameya, that is, all that 
 Can be established by the four Prama/nas, or what we 
 should call omne scibile. Twelve such objects are men- 
 tioned: (i) Self or soul, (2) body, (3) senses, (4) sense- 
 
PRAMEYA. 383 
 
 objects, (5) understanding, (6) mind, (7) activity (will), (8) 
 faults, (9) transmigration, (10) rewards of deeds, (n) suf- 
 fering, (12) final beatitude. The first six of these are 
 called causative, the other six caused. Gotaraa next pro- 
 ceeds to define each of these Prameyas, by enumerating the 
 characteristics peculiar to each. 
 
 1. The characteristics of the Self are desire, hatred, will, 
 pleasure, pain, and knowing (Buddhi). 
 
 2. Body is defined as the seat of action, of the senses, and 
 what they intimate, that is, their objects l . 
 
 3. The senses or organs of sense are defined as those of 
 smell, taste, sight, touch, and hearing. They are supposed 
 to arise from the elements. 
 
 4. These elements (from which the senses draw their 
 origin and their perceptions) are earth, water, light, air, 
 and ether ; while the objects of the senses are the qualities 
 of earth, &c. 3 such as odour, savour, colour, touch, and 
 sound. It is essential to remember that of the elements 
 the first four are both eternal and non-eternal, while the 
 fifth,.^Akasa, which we translate by ether, is eternal only, 
 and hence not tangible. The non-eternal substances are 
 either inorganic, organic, or sensitive, but always related 
 to the sense, so that the sense of light perceives or sees 
 light only. The sense of scent perceives odour only, and 
 so on. 
 
 5. As to Buddhi, understanding, it is by the Naiyayikas 
 explained as being the same as apprehension or knowledge, 
 and as being twofold, notion, Anubhava, and remembrance, 
 Smarana. 
 
 6. Mind (Manas) is different from understanding, and is 
 explained as that which prevents more than one notion 
 
 'i from arising at the same time, that is to say, it prevents 
 the rushing in of all sorts of sensuous impressions at once, 
 and regulates them in our consciousness. It is sometimes 
 called the gatekeeper or controller of the senses. The 
 transformation of sensations into percepts, and of percepts 
 into concepts, a subject little cultivated by Indian philo- 
 
 1 According to the commentary the sensations, and according to the 
 next Sutra, the qualities of the objects of sense, which alone can be 
 perceived. 
 
384 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 sophers, would naturally fall to the Manas. Little atten- 
 tion, however, is paid by Hindu logicians to this subject, 
 which has assumed such large proportions with us. Even 
 the distinction between percepts, Vorstellungen, and con- 
 cepts, Begriffe, has never been fully realised Dy Indian 
 logicians. 
 
 Manas or mind is considered as Ann or an atom, and 
 the question has been fully discussed how Manas, being 
 Ami, can be united with Atman, which is Vibhu, or in- 
 finitely great. If, with the Mimarasakas, it were admitted 
 that the two could unite, then there could never be any 
 cessation of knowledge, such as we know there is in sleep, 
 for the union of Atman and Manas, if once, effected, would 
 be indissoluble. It is held by the Naiyayikas that when 
 Manas enters a particular region of the body called Puritat, 
 the effect of the union of Atman and Manas is neutralised, 
 and sleep ensues. If Manas were supposed to be co-exten- 
 sive with the body it would be Anitya, non- eternal, and be 
 destroyed with the body, and we should lose that which 
 retains the impressions of acts done in the body, nay we 
 should be unable to account for a future life and the in- 
 equalities of birth in any future life ; we snould have to 
 admit, in fact, effects without a cause. The Naiyayikas 
 hold, therefore, that the Manas is both ATIU, infinitely 
 small., and Nitya, eternal (Tarka-kaumudi, p. 4, n. 24), while 
 Manas, like Atman, is eternal and numerous, differing, how- 
 ever, from Atman by being atomic in dimension 
 
 7. Activity (will) is the effort of body, of the under- 
 standing working through the mind (Manas), and of the 
 voice. 
 
 8. Faults cause acts, and acts bear fruit, good or bad \ 
 
 9. Pretyabhava is transmigration. 
 
 10. Rewards are results produced by faults, in the most 
 general sense, and by actions consequent on them, so that 
 they are sometimes explained as consciousness of pleasure 
 and pain. 
 
 n. Pain is characterised by vexation; and as pleasure 
 also involves pain, both pain and pleasure are here treated 
 
 1 See I, ao, Pravrittidoshagranitarthafc phalam. 
 
THE AVAYAVAS, OR MEMBERS OF A SYLLOGISM 385 
 
 together under pain. Entire deliverance from pain and 
 pleasure is 
 
 12. Apavarga or final beatitude. 
 
 Having thus examined all that can form the object of 
 our knowledge, the Praina-nas or measures of knowledge, 
 and the Prameyas, we now enter on the third of the sixteen 
 topics. 
 
 III. Saw say a. 
 
 Sams-ay a or doubt. Doubt, we are told, arises from our 
 recognition of various attributes opposed to one another 
 in one and the same object, as when we recognise in a 
 distant object the qualities of a man and of a post. The 
 definition given of doubt shows that the ancient logicians 
 of India had carefully thought about the different causes of 
 doubt, bo that they were led to the admission of three or 
 even five kinds of it. 
 
 IV. Prayoyana. V. Drrsh^anta. VI. Siddhanta. 
 
 But these disquisitions, as well as tho.se referring to (IV) 
 Prayogfana, purpose or motive ; (V) Drish/anta, example, 
 familiar case ; (VI) Siddhanta, tenets, contain nothing that 
 is of peculiar interest to the historian of philosophy, except 
 so far as they offer once more the clearest evidence of a long 
 continued previous study of logic in the ancient schools or 
 settlements of India, 
 
 VII. The Avayavas, or Members of a Syllogism. 
 
 Much more important is th^ next subject, the so-called 
 members, that is, the members of a syllogism. To us a 
 syllogism and its structure are so familiar that we hardly 
 j feel surprised at meeting with it in the schools of logic in 
 i India. Yet, unless we are inclined to admit either an 
 influence of Greek on Indian, or of Indian on Greek philo- 
 sophy, neither of which has as yet been proved, the coin- 
 cidences between the two are certainly startling. As to 
 myself I feel bound to confess that I see no evidence of 
 any direct influence, cither on one side or on the other ; 
 and though I am far from denying its possibility, I keep to 
 my conviction, expressed many years ago, that we must 
 here also admit the existence of undesigned coincidences to 
 
 25 
 
386 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 a much larger extent than our predecessors were inclined to 
 do. We must never forget that what has been possible in 
 one country, is possible in another also. 
 
 At the time when the different systems of Indian philo- 
 sophy became first known to the scholars of Europe every- 
 thing that came from the East was looked upon as of 
 extreme antiquity. There had been vague traditions of 
 ancient Indian philosophy even before the time of Aristotle. 
 Alexander himself, we are told, was deeply impressed with 
 that idea, as we may gather from his desire to communicate 
 with the gymnosophists of India. 
 
 Indian and Greek Logic 
 
 One of these gymnosophists or Digambaras seems to have 
 been the famous Kalanos (Kalyana ?), who died a voluntary 
 death by allowing himself to be burnt before the eyes of 
 the Macedonian army. It was readily admitted, therefore, 
 by European scholars that the Hindu systems of philosophy, 
 and particularly Indian Logic, were more ancient than that 
 of Aristotle, and that the Greeks had borrowed the first 
 elements of their philosophy from the Hindus. 
 
 The view that Alexander might actually have sent some 
 Indian philosophical treatises to his tutor at home, and 
 this even at a time when, as far as we know at present, 
 manuscripts in India were still unknown, and that Aris- 
 totle might have worked them up into a system, incon- 
 ceivable as it now seems to us, was taken up and warmly 
 defended by men like Gorres and others. Gorres under- 
 took to prove tjiat the Greeks had actually retained some 
 technical terms taken from Sanskrit. For instance, as 
 Indian ^philosophers admit five elements, the fifth being 
 called Akasa, ether, Gorres, without giving any reference, 
 uoted a passage from Aristotle in which he speaks of a 
 element and calls it aKaT-oyo'/uaroy, i.e. alcds-nomi- 
 , this being probably an ingenious conjecture for 
 urrov l . It is quite true that one such verbal coin- 
 j^idpnce would settle the whole question, but even that one 
 
 1 Plutarch, De Placit. Philos.,- quotes Epicurus as to the soul being 
 a mixture of three elements, fire, air, and water, anl a fourth 
 OTOV, b %v avrw alaOr)TiK6y. 
 
INDIAN AND GREEK LOGIC. 387 
 
 coincidence has not yet been 'discovered. No doubt there 
 were many points of coincidence between Greek and Indian 
 logic, but none in technical terms, which, like proper names 
 in Comparative Mythology, would have clinched the argu- 
 ment once for all. 
 
 But does it, on the other hand, show a higher power of 
 historical criticism, if Niebuhr and others stood up for the 
 opposite view and tried to derive Indian philosophy from 
 Greece ? Niebuhr is reported to have said in his Lectures 
 on Ancient History, ' If we look at Indian philosophy we 
 discern traces of a great similarity with that of the Greeks. 
 Now as people have given up the hypothesis that Greek 
 philosophy formed itself after Indian philos6phy, we can- 
 not explain this similarity except by the intercourse which 
 the Indians had with the Graeco-Macedonic kingdom of 
 Bactra.' 
 
 Is that really so ? To Niebuhr and to most Greek scholars 
 it would naturally seem next to impossible that Greek philo- 
 sophy, which can be watched from its first childhood, should 
 have been of foreign origin, a mere importation from India. 
 They know how Greek philosophy grew up gradually, how 
 its growth ran parallel with the progress of Grecian poetry, 
 religion, art, and civilisation. They feel it to be a home- 
 grown production, as certainly as Plato and Aristotle were 
 Greeks and not Brahmans. 
 
 But they ought not to be surprised if Sanskrit scholars 
 have just the same feeling with regard to Indian philosophy. 
 They also can show how in India the first philosophical 
 ideas, as yet in a very vague and shadowy form, show 
 themselves in the hymns of the early poets of the Veda. 
 They can trace their gradual development in the BrahmaTias 
 and Upanishads They can show how they gave rise to 
 discussions, public and private, how they assumed a more 
 and more definite form, and how at last they were fixed in 
 different schools in that form in which they have .reached 
 us. They, too, are as certain that philosophy was auto- 
 chthonous in India as that Gotama and Ka^ada were 
 Brahmans and not Greeks. 
 
 What then remains I It seems to me that until it can be 
 proved historically that the Greeks could freely converse 
 
 o c 2 
 
388 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 with Indians in Greek or in Sanskrit on metaphysical sub- 
 jects or vice versa, or until technical philosophical terms can 
 be discovered in Sanskrit of Greek, or in Greek of Sanskrit 
 origin, it will be best to accept facts and to regard both 
 Greek and Indian philosophy as products of the intellectual 
 soil of India and of Greece, and derive from their striking 
 similarities this simple conviction only, that in philosophy 
 also there is a wealth of truth which forms the common 
 heirloom of all mankind, and may be discovered by all 
 nations if they search for it with honesty and perse- 
 verance. 
 
 Having once learnt this lesson we shall feel less inclined, 
 whenever we meet with coincidences of any kind, to con- 
 cliide at once that they cannot be explained except by 
 admitting a historical contact and a borrowing on one side 
 or the other l . No doubt there are the Vaiseshika catego- 
 ries =Padarthas, there is Dravya, substance, Gmia, quality; 
 there is genus =: Sam&nya, and species =Vi^esha, nay, even 
 syllogism=the Avayavas; there is induction =Vy&pti, and 
 deduction =TJpanay a, both in Sanskrit and in Greek. But 
 why not ? If they could be developed naturally in Greece, 
 why not in India ? Anyhow, we must wait and not hamper 
 the progress of research by premature assertions, 
 
 VXXZ. Tarka. 
 
 But before we enter into the intricacies of the Indian 
 syllogism, it will be best to finish first what remains of 
 the sixteen topics of the Nyaya. After the five members 
 follows VIII, Tarka, which is explained as refutation, or 
 reasoning from the fitness of the case, as when a person, 
 though seeing smoke on a hill, does not see that there 
 must be fire, and 'is thereupon made to see that if the hill 
 were without fire, it would of necessity be without smoke. 
 It is meant to be a reductio ad absurdum. 
 
 IX. Hirnaya. 
 
 The next topic to be considered is IX, Niroaya, ascer- 
 tainment. 
 
 1 See M. M., On Coincidences, a paper read before the Royal Society 
 of Literature, 7896. 
 
VADA, ETC. 389 
 
 V&da, (Salpa, tTitanda, HetvAfeMaa, Gfcti, 
 
 Then follow the paragraphs connected with rhetoric or 
 eristics rather than with logic, such as X, Vada or argu- 
 mentation, consisting of objections and answers, both dis- 
 putants, however, caring for truth only; next XI, (?alpa, 
 sophistical wrangling or attacking what has been estab- 
 lished, by means of fraud ; XIV, ffati, futility, arising from 
 false analogies ; XV, IT/iala, quibbling ; and XVI, Nigra- 
 hasthana, unfitness for discussion. In the last five cases 
 disputants are supposed to care for victory only, and not 
 for truth. 
 
 If this wrangling is devoid of any attempt at really 
 establishing an opposite opinion, it is called XII, Vitawda, 
 cavilling, 
 
 We next come to XIII, Hetvabhasas, or specious argu- 
 ments, that is, paralogisms and sophisms. These are 
 Savyabhifcara, arguments that prove too much, Viruddha, 
 that prove the reverse, Prakaranasama, that tell equally on 
 both sides, Sadhyasama, that stand themselves in need of 
 proof, arid Kalatita, mistimed. 
 
 As to XV. EVtala, fraud in using words in a sense different 
 from what is generally understood, and XIV, (?ati, futility 
 arising from change of class, they have been mentioned be- 
 fore. It is difficult to understand why Crati, i.e. birth or 
 genus, should mean a futile argument, unless it meant ori- 
 ginally a transitio in alterum genus, as when, in answer 
 to an argument that a man is unable to travel, because he 
 has a fever, it should be answered that he is able to travel, 
 because he is a soldier. Here the same man is referred 
 first to the class of those who suffer from fever, and then 
 to that of soldiers who are always supposed to be able to 
 inarch. 
 
 The last, XVI, Nigrahasthana, unfitness for discussion, is 
 when a man by misunderstanding or not understanding, yet 
 continuing to talk, renders himself liable to reproof. 
 
 This may seem a long list, though in several cases there 
 are subdivisions which have here been left out, and yet at 
 the end of the list Gotama actually apologises and says 
 that there are many more sorts of futility, c., which have 
 
39O INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 been passed over by him, but will have to be discussed 
 hereafter. 
 
 Judgments on Indian Logic. 
 
 If we were to took upon this list of the sixteen topics, as 
 some have done, as an abstract of Gotama's whole philo- 
 sophy, or with others, as his table of the categories* Euro- 
 pean philosophers would no doubt be justified in saying 
 what Bitter said in his History of Philosophy that the ex- 
 position of the Nyaya is tedious, loose, and unmethodical, 
 It is certainly mixed up with subjects which have nothing 
 to do with pure logic, but so was Greek logic in its begin- 
 ning, in the school of .Zeno, for instance. It may be also 
 too minute for our taste, but it cannot be called loose at the 
 same time. It is equally unfair to charge the Nyaya and 
 all the other systems of Indian philosophy, with being un- 
 practical and with entirely ignoring all the problems of 
 ethics. We must remember that philosophy in India had 
 very different antecedents from what it had with us. We 
 o.urselves can hardly conceive a philosophy which iirthe 
 end is not to be of practical usefulness, and which ignores 
 all questions of morality. But we must learn to take philo- 
 sophers as they are. Morality with the Brahmans depends 
 either on prescriptive sacra (Dharma), or on what is called 
 Samaya, the agreement of good people. But its strongest 
 support is a firm belief in the solidarity of life here and 
 hereafter, and a firm conviction that nothing can ever be 
 lost. The popular mind of India seems never to have 
 doubted the fact that every good or every evil thought 
 or deed will grow and bear fruit, and that no one can 
 ever escape from the consequences of his own acts and 
 thoughts. Whether such a belief is right or wrong is not 
 the question, but it produced at all events a deep sense of 
 responsibility. Instead of complaints about the injustice 
 and cruelty of God, people were taught that what seemed 
 undeserved misfortunes, were fully deserved, were in fact 
 the natural consequences of previous acts, and in one respect 
 the safest means of paying off all debts. Philosophy at the 
 Same time held out a hope that in the end this net of con- 
 sequences might be broken through, and; the Self, enlight- 
 
THE LATER BOOKS OF THE NYAYA. 39! 
 
 ened by true knowledge, return to whence it came, return 
 to himself and be himself ; that is, be again the Universal 
 Self, free for ever from the chains and pains of this tran- 
 sient episode of life on earth. 
 
 That highest freedom and beatitude, according to Indian 
 views, depended on philosophy or knowledge ; it could not 
 be acquired by good works or good thoughts alone. This 
 again may be right or wrong, but I can discover no loose- 
 ness of reasoning in it, nor in Indian philosophy in general. 
 We must not forget that, from a Hindu point of view, this 
 life on earth is but an episode that may be very important 
 in itself, but is a mere nothing compared with what lies 
 behind and before, the eternal life of the soul. If they 
 hold that a knowledge of the true relation between man 
 and the world, and between man and the Author of the 
 world, is essential to true freedom and true happiness, are 
 they so far wrong ? And what is true in the case of the 
 Vedanta, the Samkhya and Yoga systems of philosophy, 
 is true in a certain sense of the Nyaya also. It may be 
 said that the fundamental points of this philosophy art 
 contained in what can be known, Prameya, and the means 
 of knowing, Prama/fta, that is to say, it seemed necessary 
 to Gotarna to establish, first of all, the limits of the two, 
 just as Kant began his philosophy with his Critique of 
 Pure Reason, that is, the tracing of the limits of Pure 
 Reason. But this being done in full detail under his 
 sixteen headings, Gotama too, like Baclaraya?ia and Kapila, 
 enters on an explanation of the process by which it was 
 possible to destroy ignorance or Mithyagwana, which, as he 
 holds, is the true cause of error or sin, * which is the cause 
 of activity, which is the cause of birth, which is the cause 
 of suffering ' (I, 3). This, whether right or wrong, is at all 
 events perfectly coherent, nor does it betray any looseness 
 of reasoning, if indirectly the whole Nyaya-philosophy is 
 called the cause of final freedom or blessedness. Modern 
 Ny&ya is almost entirely confined to PramaTia. 
 
 The Later Books of the Ny&ya. 
 
 In this way the first book of the Nyaya-Sutras gives us 
 indeed a fair outline of the whole of Gotama's philosophy, 
 
392 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 while the following three books enter into a more minute 
 examination of its details. Thus the second book treats 
 more fully of the Prama/ftas, the third and fourth of the 
 Prameyas, the fifth treats of all that comes under the head 
 of paralogisms. Some of the questions discussed in these 
 books show quite clearly that they must have formed the 
 subject of lively and long-continued controversy, for though 
 some of the objections raised may seem to us of little 
 importance, they prove at all events the conscientiousness 
 of the early Naiyayikas. 
 
 Pratyaksha, Perception. 
 
 That sensuous perception should be a PramaTta or 
 authority would hardly seem to us to have required further 
 proof. But Gotama or his opponent starts the question, 
 on what ground the evidence of the senses can claim such 
 authority, or who is the authority of its authority. This 
 is an idea that anticipates an important element of modern 
 philosophy. As a balance may serve to weigh a thing, but 
 must also be weighed or tested itself, it might be saidjbhat 
 the authority of the senses also requires to be established 
 by another authority, and so on ad infvnitum. In answer 
 to this Gotaina uses what seems to be an ad hominewi 
 argument, namely, that if there is no authority anywhere, 
 there can be none on the side of the objector eithei. The 
 objector would cut away the ground under his own feet, 
 and thus would himself have no locus standi for offering 
 any objections (II, 13). 
 
 But admitting that sensuous perception has authority 
 just as a lamp has light to light up the things around it, 
 the next question is whether the definition of sensuous 
 perception, that which results from contact of -sense with 
 its object, is not incomplete, because for real perception 
 there must be contact not only with the organs of sense, 
 but likewise between the senses and the mind (Manas), and 
 between the mind and the Self (Atman). This is not 
 denied by Gotama, he only defends himself by saying that 
 everything cannot be said at the same time, and that his 
 definition of perception, though it dwells only on what is 
 essential (the contact of sense and object), does by no 
 
TIME PRESENT, PAST, FUTURE 393 
 
 means exclude that between mind and Self, on the contrary 
 takes it here for granted. He also admits that contact 
 between sense and object does not invariably produce 
 perception, that in fact there may be sensation without 
 perception, as when we are so absorbed in listening to 
 music that we do not perceive the objects around us, from 
 want of attention. This again reminds us of modeiai 
 philosophy. Even such questions as to whether there is 
 any interval of time between our hearing the sound of 
 a word and our realising its meaning, are alluded to by 
 Gotama and his school, and the question whether several 
 impressions can be taken in at the same time is negatived 
 by a reference to the running of a pin through a number 
 of sheets of a MS. Here the piercing seems simultaneous, 
 yet we know that it can only be successive. Another 
 question also which has lately occupied our psycho-physi- 
 ologists, whether perception does not involve inference, is 
 discussed by Gotama (II, 31), particularly in cases where 
 our senses can apprehend a part only of their object when 
 perceiving, for instance, a tree, of which one side only can 
 be seen at the time, while the rest has to be supplied by 
 memory or inference. This leads him on to another ques- 
 tion whether there really is such a thing as a whole, and 
 as we can in reality never see more than one side at a time, 
 he tries4*> account for the process by which we take a part 
 for the whole. No one, for instance, has ever seen more 
 than one side of the moon, yet taking it as a whole, 
 and as a globe, we postulate and are convinced that there 
 is another side also. The illustration given by Gotama to 
 show that a tree is a whole, namely, because when we 
 shake one branch of it, the whole tree trembles, may seem 
 childish to us, but it is exactly in these simple and so-called 
 childish thoughts that the true interest of ancient philo- 
 sophy seerns to me to consist. 
 
 Time Present, Fast, Future. 
 
 The next problem that occupies Gotama is that of time 
 of present, past, and future. The objector, and in this 
 case, it seems, a very real objector, for it is the opinion of 
 the Buddhists, denies that there is such a thing as present 
 
394 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY, 
 
 time, because the moment we see a fruit falling from a tree, 
 we see only that it has fallen or that it has still to fall, but 
 never that it is falling. Here the answer is that past and 
 future themselves would be impossible, if the present did 
 not exist, and on the objector's admitting such a possibility. 
 Gotama remarks that in that case perception and all that 
 springs from it would be altogether impossible, because it 
 can only depend on what is present. 
 
 Upamana, Comparison 
 
 Passing over what is said in this piace about the validity 
 of inference, because we shall have to return to it hereafter, 
 we find Gotama bent on establishing by the side of it, by 
 the side of Anumana, his next instrument of knowledge, 
 namely Upamana, analogy or comparison. And here Gotama 
 seems in conflict with KaTiada who, as we shall see, declines 
 to accept Upamana, comparison, as one of the independent 
 authoritative evidences, or, at all events, as essentially 
 different from Anumana, inference. We might feel tempted 
 to conclude from this that Gotama must have been laier in 
 time than Kaw/ada. But first of all, Kanada's name is not 
 mentioned here nor that of his system, Vaiseshika; and 
 secondly, we know that this question of the Prama/nas had 
 been discussed again and again in every school of Indian 
 philosophy, so that a mere reference to the subject cannot 
 be used as determining the seniority either of the opponent 
 or of the defender. All we can say is that, whenever we 
 see Upamana appealed to as a means of valid knowledge, 
 we know that we have to deal with followers of the Nyaya 
 school ; but the Vaiseshika, though denying it an inde- 
 pendent place among the Pram&?ms, would by no means 
 reject it, if presented as a kind of Anumana. 
 
 abda, the Word. 
 
 We now come to the various kinds of verbal testimony. 
 Testimony is said to be conveyed by words, and by a sen- 
 tence, consisting of many words, conveying the meaning of 
 each word in its relation to the other words. Though the 
 meaning of words is admitted to be conventional, yet 
 opinions differ because some consider such conventions to 
 
THE EIGHT PRAMA.YAS. 395 
 
 be eternal or divine, while others take them to be non- 
 eternal or human. The chief authority for determining 
 the meaning of a word is admitted to be the usage of 
 trustworthy persons, but it is argued that as the highest 
 authority is Brahman or God, and as the Veda is the word 
 of Brahman, it follows that every word of the Veda 
 possesses the highest authority. This, however, as we know, 
 does not satisfy the Mimamsakas, who assign eternity to 
 the /Sabda itself, the word or the sound of a word. 
 
 In the examination of the validity of $abda or word, we 
 find again the same question started as before, whether it 
 deserves a place by itself, or whether it should not rather 
 be treated as a kind of inference. Then, after Gotama has 
 shown the difference between I know ' and * I infer, 5 
 between acceptance of the word of an authority (Apto- 
 padesa) and reliance on an inference, he enters on new 
 problems such as the association of sense with sound, 
 a question which is intimately connected with the question 
 of what authority is due to the Veda as the Word par 
 excellt/nce. Here we meet with a number of arguments in 
 defence of the supreme authority of the Veda with which 
 we are familiar from the Purva-Mimamsa, but which 
 again, though clearly referring to <?aimini, must not be 
 taken to prove the anteriority of (raimini's Sfttras to those 
 of Gotaina's, and certainly do not enable us to admit more 
 than the contemporaneous activity of the various schools 
 of Hindu philosophy during the centuries intervening be- 
 tween the close of the Vedic age and the rise and spread 
 of Buddhism. 
 
 The Eigiit Frama?;as. 
 
 Having defended the teaching of the Nyaya, that there 
 are four Pramanas, neither more nor less, Gotama proceeds 
 to criticise the four additional Pramanas of the Mima/w- 
 sakas, and shows that their number is superabundant. 
 They include, as we saw, Aitihya, tradition, not necessarily 
 authoritative, Arthapatti, assumption, Sambhava, proba- 
 bility, and even Abhava, non-existence, because they hold 
 that there can be knowledge arising from not-being or 
 from absence, as when we conclude from the fact that 
 
396 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Devadatta is not in his house, that he must have gone out. 
 Of these four Pram&?ias the first is referred by Getama to 
 $abda, Word, the others to Anumana, inference, while 
 -Keshtfa, or mere gesture, as supplying knowledge, may> it 
 is added, be classed either under Word, like written letters, 
 or under Anumana. The Prama^as seem to have formed 
 a subject of prominent interest to the Nyaya philosophers ; 
 in modern times they have absorbed the whole of Nyaya. 
 
 We are told that Nagar<?una, before he became a Buddhist ? 
 was a zealous student of the Nyaya-philosophy. He wrote 
 a work, called Prama7ia-samuM*aya, which was, however, 
 supposed to be lost, till Sarat Chandra discovered a Tibetan 
 version ol it in the library of the Grand Lama at Lhassa 
 (Journal of the Buddhist Text Society, IV 3 parts iii and 
 iv, p. 17)1. 
 
 Here follow long discussions as to the nature of words, 
 the difference between sound (Dhvani) and words, till we 
 arrive again at the question whether the word is eternal, 
 and therefore a PramaTia by itself, or not. Similar ques- 
 tions occur in most of the Indian philosophical systems, 
 and as I passed them over before, it will be necessary to 
 examine them more fully in this place, where we meet with 
 tjiem again as worked out by Gotama. Though they deal 
 with such purely grammatical questions as whether a vowel 
 such as i can ever be changed into the semi- vowel y, in 
 fact whether any letter can ever become another letter, 
 these disquisitions branch out very far, and we shall be 
 surprised to see how intimately in the minds of Hindu 
 philosophers they are connected with some of the greatest 
 problems of philosophy, such as the existence of a Creator 
 and the relation between the cause and the effect of our 
 created world. 
 
 The oftener we read these discussions on the eternal 
 character of sound, on words and their true nature, and at 
 last on the divine, nay transcendental character of language, 
 the more we shall feel the difference between Eastern and 
 Western philosophy. The true problem of language has 
 been almost entirely neglected by Greek philosophers and 
 
 1 This would prove at the same time the^tudy of the Ny&ya-philosophy 
 In the firsfc century of our era ; see p. 366. 
 
THOUGHTS ON LANGUAGE. 397 
 
 their disciples in Europe, for all the discussions about the 
 (frva-fi or flcW i origin of language touch only the very hem 
 of the question, as it presents itself to Indian philosophers. 
 The way in which the problem of language is handled by 
 them will no doubt be dismissed as childish by modern 
 philosophers, and I do not mean to deny that some of their 
 remarks on language are really childish, But we shall see 
 that the whole question is treated by Hindu philosophers 
 in a very serious and searching spirit. Students of philo- 
 sophy should overlook what may seem strange to them 
 in the manner of treatment, and always try to keep their 
 eye on what is important and has often been overlooked 
 even by the greatest thinkers among us. Language has 
 been to most of us so familiar a subject that we have hardly 
 perceived what is behind it, and have scarcely asked the 
 questions which it has cost so much effort to Indian philo- 
 sophers to answer. We have already on a former occasion 
 examined some of the views on language, as expressed in 
 the philosophical hymns, BrahmaTias, and Upanishads of 
 the Y^die period. We have now to follow up these views 
 as they are presented to us in a more systematic form in 
 the Sfttra-period. 
 
 Thoughts on 
 
 If I was right in tracing the word BHh, speech, in 
 Brihas-pati, back to the same root as that of Brahman, the 
 connection of the two ideas, Word and Creator, would 
 carry us back even beyond what we call the Vedic period. 
 At all events the idea that Brahman was the Word, and 
 that the world was created by the Word, existed, as we 
 saw, long before the rise of philosophical systems. It was 
 shadowed forth in the very language of India, but it 
 received its full development in the Sfttras only, more 
 particularly in the Vedanta-Sfttras, to which we must 
 return for our present purpose. We read in Sfttra I, 3, 28 : 
 'We refute his objection on the ground that (the world) 
 originates from the Word, as is shown both by perception 
 and by inference/ Perception is here taken in the sense of 
 $ruti, scripture, *and inference in the sense of Smriti, 
 tradition. An objection had been started that the Veda 
 
398 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 could not be considered as eternal, if it contained names of 
 non-eternal things, and as even the gods, the Devas, were 
 looked upon as non-eternal, having been proved to be 
 subject to birth and rebirth, it followed that the Veda, as 
 containing their names, could not possibly be ante-temporal 
 or eternal. Against this, though readily admitting the 
 non-eternal character of the gods, the Devas, $amkara 
 argues, that in spite of that, the gods and other beings, nay 
 the whole word, must be admitted to have originated from 
 the Word or the Veda, and that this Word * is Brahman. 
 Only, he adds, it is not the individuals, nor this or that 
 Deva, not this or that cow or horse, that had their origin 
 in the Word, but the genus to which they belong, that is, 
 the elbrj (Akritis). It is with the genus that words are 
 connected, not with individuals, for these, as being infinite 
 in number, are not capable of entering into that connection. 
 Hence all individual things, and individual gods also, are 
 allowed to have had an origin, but not the genus to which 
 they belong, which was thought and uttered at first by 
 Brahman. Nor must it be supposed that the Word con- 
 stitutes the material cause of things ; this, as shown before, 
 lies in Brahman only, which is therefore more than the 
 Word. The word of the Veda is simply the expression of 
 what is permanent and eternal in all things (universalia 
 in rebus), and as all individual things are created in 
 accordance with it, they are rightly said to have their true 
 origin in the Veda and in Brahman. This is afterwards 
 confirmed by passages from $ruti and Smriti, such as Brih. 
 Ar. Up. I, a, 4 : ( Then with his mind he united himself 
 with Speech/ The Word therefore, or Speech, existed 
 before creation, as we read in the Smriti also, e.g. the 
 Mahabharata XII, 8534: 'He who exists by himself let 
 - first stream forth the Word, the eternal, without beginning 
 or end, the Divine Word which we read in the Veda, 
 whence proceeded the evolution of the world ' ; and again, 
 Mahabh. XII, 8535: 'God in the beginning created the 
 names and forms of things, and the continuous process of 
 their works.' 
 
 If we read such passages carefully, it is easy to see that 
 Veda, which is identified with the words of creation, or the 
 
THOUGHTS ON LANGUAGE. 399 
 
 ideas or locjoi of the world, was meant for more than what 
 was afterwards called the three Vedas, the Samhitas, and 
 Brahma?ias. Veda stands here for Logos or Sophia, and 
 comprehends all named concepts, necessary for the creation 
 of all created things. 
 
 In order to show that there is nothing strange in this, 
 $amkara, remarks that even we ourselves, whe .1 we mean 
 to do anything, have first to think of the word for what 
 we mean to do. In the same manner the words of the 
 Veda had to be present to the mind of the Creator, Pragra- 
 pati, before he could have created the things corresponding 
 to them. And thus it is said in the Veda (Taitt. Br. II, 2, 
 4, a) : ' " This is the earth," he said, and created the earth/ 
 This will sound strange to many readers, as, I confess, it 
 sounded strange to me when I first came across these 
 thoughts, so full of Neo-platonic reminiscences, nay even to 
 such O. T. thought as ' God spake, Let there be light, and 
 there was light/ Of course, if we can bring ourselves to 
 say, that the Logos of the Alexandrian philosophers had no 
 antecedents in early Greek philosophy 1 9 there would be an 
 end of the whole question, and we should simply have to 
 admit that Brahmans came to Alexandria, arid indoctrinated 
 pagan and Christian philosophers with their ideas of Va& 
 or Speech. But as every Greek scholar knows that the 
 very opposite is the case, and I have tried to show this on 
 several occasions, the question requires a very different 
 solution from that proposed by Professor Weber, if indeed 
 it admits of any. Why will people not see that it is far 
 more scholarlike to confess our ignorance than to give an 
 answer, however hesitatingly, and thus to discourage further 
 research ? 
 
 Hindu philosophers have treated this whole question 
 with so much care that we can see at least that they truly 
 cared for it, and had fully perceived its intimate connection 
 with some of the highest problems, both religious and 
 philosophical, which were nearest to their heart. 
 
 They begin with the beginning and try first to make it 
 clear to themselves what $abda is. $abda means word, 
 
 1 See Anathon Aall, Geschichte der Logosidee, i8g6, pp. 218 seq. 
 
4OO INDUN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 but it also means sound, and they therefore begin with 
 asking what sound is. We have seen already that they 
 actually postulated a fifth element Akasa, which we trans- 
 late by ether, and which was meant to be the vehicle qf 
 sound and of sound only. The existence of this fifth 
 element was altogether denied by the materialists, the 
 Barhaspat} as, because it is supersensible, but it was 
 admitted as an independent element by the other schools 
 of thought, even by the Buddhists, because they held that 
 air could not possibly be the vehicle of sound. Its loud- 
 ness might depend on it, but 'not its quality. The Vaite- 
 shika-philosophy, for instance, which takes a special interest 
 in the question of the elements, explains sound as the 
 object apprehended by the sense of hearing (II, 2, 21). It 
 then declares that sound is neither substance nor action, 
 but a quality (cf. I, i, 6 com.), having Akasa or ether for 
 its substance. The opinion that sound exists always and 
 eternally, and is only made manifest by each speaker, 
 which is held by the Mima/msakas, is rejected by Karzlda, 
 sounds and words being accepted as momentary manifesta- 
 tions only of eternal sound. This is illustrated by the 
 striking of a drum with a drumstick, where we can clearly 
 see that sound is produced by a conjunction between a 
 drum and a drumstick, and that it is only carried along by 
 the air. 
 
 All these arguments are clearly directed against the 
 Minia/msakas who for reasons of their own require $abda, 
 whether sound or word, to be eternal. It must be said, 
 however, to their honour that they allow full credit to 
 the Pftrvapakshin who opposes the eternal character of 
 sounds and words. * No/ he says 1 , ' sound cannot be eternal, 
 because we see (i) that it is a product, (2) that it passes 
 away, (3) that it is made (the very letters being called 
 A-kara, Ka-kara &c., A-making, Ka-making &c.). We see 
 (4) that it is perceived by different persons at once, (5) that 
 it changes (as Dadhi Atra changes to Dadhy Atra), and 
 (6) that it is augmented by the number of those who make 
 it. But to all these difficulties the Mima/wsaka has a ready 
 
 1 Cf. Ballantyne's MimamSA-Sutras, p. 8 ; Muir, Orig. Sansk. Texts, III, 
 pp. 70 seq. 
 
THOUGHTS ON LANGUAGE. 4O1 
 
 answer. The word is eternal, he says, and though the 
 perception of sound is the same on both sides, we are right 
 in looking on sound as eternal and as always present, only 
 not always manifested on account of the absence of an 
 utterer or an exciter. The letter k, now heard, is the same 
 which has always been heard. If it is said that sound is 
 made, that only means that it is employed, and if it is 
 perceived at the same time by many, the same applies to 
 the sun. As to the modification of sound, it is no,t the 
 same letter modified, but it is another letter in the plac 
 of a letter, and as to the increase of noise, that is due to 
 the increase of the number of conjunctions and disjunctions 
 of the air. 
 
 {jaimini's reasons in support of the eternal character 
 of sound are that, though the sound may vanish, it leaves 
 its traces in the mind of the hearer or learner; that it is 
 everywhere at the same time ; that, if repeated, it is the 
 same, and that we have no right to suppose that it is ever 
 annihilated. If it should be supposed that sound is a mere 
 modification of air, the answer is that the ear does not 
 simply hear the air, btit is sensitive only to what is in- 
 tangible in sound, the quality. Besides, there are the 
 definite words of the Veda which tell us of an eternal 
 Voice. 
 
 Having thus established to his own satisfaction the 
 eternity of sound, (?aiinini proceeds to defend the sounds 
 or words of the Veda against all possible objections. These 
 arguments were examined by us before, when the author- 
 ship of the Veda had to be discussed, and when it was 
 shown that the author of the Veda could riot have been 
 a personal being, but that the Veda could only have been 
 seen by inspired Rishis as revealed to them, not as made 
 by them. We may therefore at once proceed to the next 
 point, namely, to the question, as to what constitutes a 
 word, and what according to Indian philosophers is its real 
 character. Though these discussions are of a grammatical 
 rather than of a philosophical character, they deserve our 
 attention, because they show how keen an interest the 
 ancient philosophers of India had taken in the Science 
 of Language, and how clearly they had perceived the 
 
 26 0d 
 
4O2 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 intimate relation between language and thought, and in 
 consequence between the Science of Language and the 
 Science of Thought or Philosophy. 
 
 How well the Hindus understood that the study of 
 language forms an integral part of philosophy, we may 
 gather from the fact that they actually admitted Pa/mni, 
 their greatest grammarian, among their representative 
 philosophers. They had evidently perceived that language 
 is the only phenomenal form of thought, and that, as 
 human beings possess no means of perceiving the thoughts 
 of others, nay even their own thoughts, except in the form 
 of words, it- was the duty of a student of thought to inquire 
 into the nature of words before he approached or analysed 
 the nature of what we mean by thought, naked thought, 
 nay skinned thought, as it has been truly called, when 
 divested of its natural integuments, the words, They 
 understood what even modern philosophers have failed to 
 understand, that there is a difference between Vorstellung 
 (presentation or percept) and Begriff (concept), and that 
 true thought has to do with conceptual words only, nay 
 that the two, word and thought, are inseparable, and perish 
 when separated. Madhava in his survey of all philosophies, 
 assigns a place between Gaimini's Purva-Mima/msa and 
 Kapila's Samkhya to the P&Timi Darsana, what we should 
 call the grammatical system of Pa/mni. Other .systems 
 also treat most fully of linguistic questions, as, for instance, 
 the Pilrva-Mima'wsa when treating of the question whether 
 sound, the material element of words, is eternal or not. 
 
 Bpbola. 
 
 Hindu philosophers have actually elaborated an ide 
 which does not exist in any other philosophy, that of 
 Sphofci. It is true that in Pamni's own Sutras the word! 
 Sphoa does not occur, but the name of a grammarian whom; 
 he quotes (VI. I, 123), Sphotfayana, shows that this peculiar 
 word Sphofa must have existed before Pa/ttini's time. J)e-j 
 rived as it is from Sphutf. Sphoa must have meant origin- 
 ally what bursts forth. It has been translated by expres- 
 sion, notion, concept or idea, but none of these renderings 
 can be considered as successful. It really means the .sound 
 
SPHC^A. 403 
 
 of a word as a whole, and as conveying a meaning, apart 
 from its component letters. The subject has been well 
 treated by Madhava in his Sarva-darsana-samgraha. Here, 
 when examining the Pa?uni Dargana, he. shows first of all 
 that the Sabda or word which Pa/nini professes to teach 
 in his ^abdanusasana, or grammar, is really the same as 
 Brahman. ' The eternal word,' he writes, ; which is called 
 Sphola, and is without parts, is the true cause of the world/ 
 is in fact Brahman, and he adds thereupon some lines from 
 Bhartrihari's Bralimakam/a, where that grammarian (died 
 650 A. D.) says : 
 
 Brahman, without beginning or end, the indestructible 
 
 essence of language. 
 Which developed in the form of things, and Avhence 
 
 springs the creation of the world.' - J 
 What more could be said of the Neo-platonic Logos'? 
 
 In answer to some who deny the existence of such a 
 Spho^a, it is maintained r ihat it is actually an object of 
 perception, for all men, on hearing the word ' cow/ know 
 it as distinct from the letters composing it, This shows, 
 as we knew already from the Prati&ikhyas, thatfthe Hindus 
 had elaborated the idea of letters, nay even of vowels and 
 consonants, long before they became acquainted with the 
 written, letters of a Semitic alphabet, and I only wonder 
 that thooe who believe in an ancient indigenous alphabet, 
 'should never have appealed, though vainly, to the dis- 
 cussions of Sphofoi, in support of their opinion. And if 
 it were said that cognition arises from the separate letters 
 of a word, we as~lr, he says, whether these letters are sup-/ 
 posed to produce cognition in their collective or in their 
 separate form. It cannot be in their collective form, 
 because each letter, as soon as pronounced, vanishes, $nd 
 therefore cannot form a whole ; nor can it be in their 
 separate form, because no single letter has the power of 
 producing cognition of the meaning of any word. As 
 therefore the, letters, whether in their single or their united 
 form, cannot produce cognition, there must be something 
 I else by means of which knowledge is produced, and that 
 ; is the Sphofa, the sound, distinct from the letters though 
 'revealed by them. He then quotes from Patfltfl^alrs Ma.na- 
 
 od * 
 
404 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 bh&shya: 'Now what i the word Cow? It is that by 
 which, when pronounced, there is produced in vs the simul- 
 taneous cognition of dewlap, tail, hump, hoofs, and horns/ 
 Kaiyate, explains this more fully by saying: ' Grammarians 
 maintain that it is the word, as- distinct from the letters; 
 which expresses the meaning, since, if the letters expressed 
 it, there would be no use in pronouncing the second and 
 following ones (as the first would already have conveyed 
 all that is wished). It is therefore something distinct from 
 the single letters which conveys the meaning, and that is 
 what we call the Sphotfa.' 
 
 The objector, however, is not silenced at once. He, too, 
 asks the question whether this Sphofa is manifest or non- 
 manifest. If it required no manifestation, it would always 
 be there, but if it requires manifestation, this could be 
 by its. letters only, when they are pronounced; and thus 
 the same difficulties which were pointed out before as to 
 the collective or single action of letters, would arise again. 
 This dilemma is put forward by Bhafta in his Mima/ms&- 
 sloka-varttika : 'The grammarian who holds that Sphotfa is 
 manifested by the letters as they are severally pronounced 
 and apprehended, though itself one and indivisible, does 
 not thereby escape from a single difficulty/ 
 
 On this point Panini (I, 4, 14) seems to have given the 
 right solution, by laying it down as a principle that letters 
 can never form a word unless they have an affix at the 
 end, while the letters, as they are apprehended, simply 
 help to convey the meaning by means of a conventional 
 association (deem). This shows that the conventional 
 character of the relation between sound and meaning was 
 fully recognised in India, whether that sound was called! 
 /Sabda or Sphotfa.' Nor is it enough that the letters should j 
 be the same, they must also follow each other in the same 
 order, otherwise Vasa and Sava, Nava and Vana, &c., 
 would carry the same meaning, which they do not. 
 
 All this was meant to show that the admission of a 
 Sphofa was unnecessaiy ; but we now get the orthodox, 
 answer, namely, that the admission of Sphxtfa is necessary 
 and that all the objections are no more than a catching 
 at a straw by a drowning person, because separate letters 
 
WORDS EXPRESS THE 8UMMUM GENUS. 405 
 
 would never be a word, as little as flowers without a string, 
 would be a wreath. And as the letters cannot combine, 
 :>eing evanescent as soon as they have been pronounced, 
 ;ve are asked to admit a Sphotfa, and to accept the first 
 etters, as revealing the invisible Sphotfa, whereas the 
 following letters serve only to make that Sphotfa more and 
 more manifest and explicit. 
 
 Words express the Summum Genus. 
 
 After having thus in his own way established the theory 
 of a Sphoia for every word, our philosophical grammarian 
 lakes another step, trying to prove that the meaning of all 
 words is ultimately that summum genus (Satta), namely 
 >ure existence, the characteristic of which is consciousness 
 )f the supreme reality. And lest it should be thought 
 ihat in that case all words would mean one and the same 
 ihing, namely Brahman or being, it is remarked that in one 
 sense this is really so ; but that, as a crystal is coloured by 
 its surroundings, Brahman, when connected with different 
 things and severally identified with each, stands after- 
 wards for different species, such as cow, horse, &c., these 
 3eing first of all ' existence ' (Satta) or the highest genus, 
 as found in individuals, and then only what they are in 
 ihis phenomenal world. In support of this another passage 
 of BhartoiharFs is quoted : .' Existence being divided, a$ 
 :ound in cows, &c,, is called this or that species by means 
 of its connection with different objects, and on it all words 
 depend. This they call the meaning of the stem, and the 
 meaning of the root. This is existence, this is the great 
 Aim an (or Brahman), expressed by affixes such as Tva, Tal, 
 &c., which form abstract nouns, such as Ga-tva, cow-hood, 
 &c. For existence, as the summum genus , is found in all 
 things, in cows, horses, &c., and therefore all words, expres- 
 sive of definite meanings, rest ultimately on the swrn/rriwn 
 genus, existence, differentiated by various thoughts or words, 
 such as cows, horses, &c., in which it resides. If the stem- 
 word, the. Pratipadika, expresses existence, the root ex- 
 presses Bhava, a state, or, as others say, Kriya, action/ . 
 
 This will remind us of^many of the speculations of Greek 
 as well as medieval logicians ; and tt is Exactly what my 
 
406 -INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 late friend Noire tried to establish, that all words originally 
 expressed action, to which I added the amendment that 
 they expressed either an action or a status. If this true 
 kernel of every word is Jby Hindu philosophers called the 
 Great Atman (Mahan Atma). and Satta, the summum 
 genus, we must remember that, according to the Vedanta, 
 Brahman is the true substance of everything. This is 
 stated again by Bhartrihari : 
 
 ' The true reality is known under its illusory forms, by 
 words under untrue disguises; the true reality is named 
 (for a time), like the house of Devadatta, so called for a' 
 vanishing reason (that is, only so long as Devadatta is 
 the possessor of the house) ; but by the word house, pure 
 househood l only is expressed/ 
 
 Words expressive of Genera or Individuals V 
 
 But while the meaning of all words is -thus admitted 
 to be Brahman, we meet with two schools, the one of 
 Vagrapyayana, maintaining that our ordinary words mean 
 a genus, the other, of Vyadi, who holds that they mear: indi- 
 vidual things. PaTiini holds both views as true in grammar, 
 for in one place, I, 2, 58, he shows that * a Brahman 5 may 
 mean many Brahmans,. as when we say, that a Brahman 
 is to be honoured ; in another, I, 2, 64, he states that the 
 plural Riimas means always Rama, Rama and Ramd, i.e, so 
 many single Ramas. 
 
 All Words mean rr> &\ 
 
 The idea that all words in the end mean Brahman, the 
 one Supreme Being, was necessitated by the very character 
 of ijhe Vedanta-philosophy, which admits of "no duality 
 except as the result of nescience. Hence it is said : The 
 Supreme Being is the thing denoted by all words, arid it is 
 identical with the word; but the relation of the two, while 
 they are ultimately identical, varies as it does in the case 
 of the, two Atmans, the Paramatman and the (?ivatman, 
 the highest or universal, and the living or individual soul, 
 the difference between the two being due to Avidya or 
 
 i 
 
 1 Read Grihatvam instead of Gnhitam ? 
 
ALL WOliDS MEAN TO ov. i 407 
 
 temporary nescience. As early as the M&itraya?ia Upa- 
 nishad we meet with verses to the same effect, and of an 
 earlier date than itself, such as (VI, 32), ' Two Branmans 
 have to he meditated on, the Word and the Non-word, and 
 by the Word alone is the Non-word revealed/ In this 
 way the grammatical philosophers endeavoured to prove 
 that grammar or exposition of words, as it was called 
 by Fata;? grail ($abd&nusasaiia), is, like every other system 
 of philosophy, 'the means of final beatitude, the door of 
 emancipation, the medicine of the diseases of language, 
 the purifier of all sciences, the science of sciences ; it is the 
 first rung on the ladder that leads up to final bliss, and 
 the straight royal road among all the roads that lead to 
 emancipation/ 
 
 This may be accepted as representing the views, if not 
 of Pa/mni himself, at least of his followers ; and I must say 
 that if his explanation of a word as a number of letters 
 ending in a suffix had been accepted, there would have 
 been no necessity for the admission of a Sphoa. It was 
 evidently not seen by the inventors of this Sphotfa that 
 letters have no independent existence at all, and can be 
 considered only as the result of a scientific analysis, and 
 that words existed long before even the idea of letters 
 had been formed. Letters, by themselves, have no raison 
 d'etre. Sphota is in fact the word before it had been 
 analysed into letters, the-- breaking forth of a whole and 
 undivided utterance, such as Go, 'cow/ conveying a mean- 
 ing which does not depend on any single letter nor on any 
 combination of them. Though from our point of view the 
 idea of such a Sphotfa may -seem unnecessary, we cannot 
 help admiring the ingenuity of the ancient philosophers of 
 India in inventing such a term, and in seeing difficulties 
 which never attracted the attention of European philo- 
 sophers. For it is perfectly true that the letters, ^is such, 
 have no reality and no power, and that every word is 
 something different from its letters, something undivided 
 and indivisible. In such a word as V&&, Vox, we have 
 not a combination of three letters, v, a, k, which would be 
 nothing, but we have an indivisible explosion, expressive 
 of its meaning in its undivided form only, and this maybe 
 
4.68 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 raised to the s'atus of a word by means of a grammatical 
 suffix which, as we should say, makes an organised whole 
 of it. All this is true and recognised now by all students 
 of the Science of Language, though never even suspected 
 by the philosophers of other countries. 
 
 Still more important is the idea that all words originally 
 meant Brahman or TO 6v, and receive their special meaning 
 from their relation to the genera or logoi in the mind of 
 Brahman, as creative types. Words are not names of in- 
 dividuals, but always of classes or genera, and as genera 
 they are eternal. These logoi existed before the creation 
 of the worlfl, nay, rendered that creation possible. This is 
 the much-despised Neo-platonic philosophy, the basis of the 
 Christian theory of creation ; and that we should find it 
 so fully elaborated in the ancient world of India is surely 
 a surprise, and, I should add, a welcome surprise. And can 
 we suppose that ideas which, in Greece, required so many 
 evolutions of thought till they reached the point which 
 they reached in Alexandria, and afterwards in Palestine, 
 should have sprung up in India suddenly or, as it were, 
 casually? Do we not rather see clearly here also how long 
 and how continuous a development of thought must have 
 taken place south of the Himalayas before such fruits 
 could have ripened ? Would any Greek scholar dare to 
 say that all this was borrowed from Greece ? Would any 
 Sanskrit scholar be so intrepid as to hint that the Greeks 
 might possibly have learnt their Logos from the Vedic Va/c ? 
 Even if we do not accept the last results of this Indian line 
 of thought, which ended w\ere Greek philosophy ended, 
 and where Christian philosophy began, nay even if we 
 should put aside as unintelligible the beginning words of the 
 fourth Gospel, * In the beginning was the Word/ we can at 
 least admire the struggle which led up to this view of the 
 world, and tried to establish the truth that there is a Logos, 
 thought, that there is Rhyme and Reason in the world, and 
 that the whole universe is full of Brahman, the Eternal 
 and the Divine, not visible to the human eye, though 
 visible to the human mind. That mind, according to 
 Indian philosophy, has its true being in the Divine Mind, 
 in which it lives and moves, in which alone it has its 
 
ALL WORDS MEAN TO 6V 409 
 
 true Self or Atman, which Atman is Brahman. To have 
 mounted to such heights, even if we have to descend again 
 frightened and giddy, must have strengthened the muscles 
 of human reason, and will remain in our memory as a sight 
 never to be forgotten, even in the lower spheres in which 
 we have to move in our daily life and amidst our daily 
 duties. Speaking for myself, I am bound to say that 
 I have felt an acquaintance with the general spirit of Indian 
 philosophy as a blessing from my very youth, being 
 strengthened by it against all the antinomies of being and 
 thinking, and nerved in all the encounters with the scep- 
 ticism and materialism of our own ephemeral philosophy. 
 It is easy, no doubt, to discover blemishes in the form and 
 style of Indian philosophy, I mean chiefly the Vedanta' 
 and to cite expressions which at first sight seem absurd. 
 But there are such blemishes and such absurdities in all 
 philosophies, even in the most modern. Many people have 
 smiled at the Platonic ideas, at the atoms of Democritus, or 
 at the location of the soul in the pineal gland or in certain 
 parts of the brain ; yet all this belongs to the history of 
 philosophy, and had its right place in it at the right time. 
 What the historian of philosophy has to do is first of all to 
 try to understand the thoughts of great philosophers, then 
 to winnow what is permanent from what is temporary, 
 and to discover, if possible, the vein of gold that runs 
 through the quartz, to keep the gold, and to sweep away 
 the rubbish. Why not do the same for Indian philosophy ? 
 Why not try to bring it near to us, however far removed 
 from it we may seem at first sight. In all other countries 
 philosophy has railed at religion and religion has railed at 
 philosophy. In India alone the two have always worked 
 together harmoniously, religion deriving its freedom from 
 philosophy, philosophy gaining its spirituality from re- 
 ligion. Is not that something to make us think, and to 
 remind us of the often-repeated words of Terence, Humani 
 nihtt a me alienum puto ? A rich kernel is often covered 
 by a rough skin, and true wisdom may be hiding where we 
 least expect it, 
 
4IO INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Ved&nta on Sphofa. 
 
 We have now to see what the other systems of philo- 
 sophy have to say on this subject, for it is quite clear that 
 the idea of a Sphoa, though known to them, was not ac- 
 cepted by all. oflCmkara, as representing the Vedanta-philo- 
 sophy, is entirely opposed to the admission of a Sphoa. 
 He fully admits that earth and all the rest were created 
 according to the words earth, &c., which were present to 
 the mind of the Creator, but he asks, how were these words 
 present ? Beginning as usual with the Purvapakshin l or 
 opponent, he produces as arguments in favour of the admis- 
 sion of a Sphotfa, that the letters cannot convey the meaning, 
 because as soon as they are pronounced they perish, because 
 they differ according to the pronunciation of each speaker, 
 because they possess neither singly nor collectively any 
 significative power, because not even the last letter with 
 the impression left by the preceding letter in our memory, 
 would convey to us the sense of a word. Hence something 
 different from the letters must be admitted, the Sphoa, the 
 outburst of the whole word, presenting itself all at once as 
 the object of our mental act of apprehension. That Sphoa 
 is what is eternal, different therefore from perishable and 
 changeable letters, and it is that Sphoa from which what- 
 ever is denoted by it was produced in creation, an$ which 
 _in conversation conveys to others what is in our own rpind, 
 but always clothed in sound. 
 
 $amkara himself, however, considers such an admission 
 of a Sphotfa entirely unnecessary, and, in order to prove 
 this, he goes back and calls to his aid an old Vedantist, 
 Upavarsha, whom he refers to elsewhere also (III, 3, 53) 2 . 
 This Upavarsha argues that the letters by themselves con- 
 stitute the word, because though they perish as fast as they 
 are pronounced, they are always recognised again as the 
 same letters, not only as belonging to the same class, but 
 
 1 Ved. Sutras i, 3, 28. This is one of the cases where the Piirvapaksha, 
 the opponent's view, has boon mistaken for Samkara's own final opinion, 
 or for the Siddhanta. 
 
 8 Here Samkara charges oauarasvamin, the famous commentator on 
 the Purva-Mimaw&a, I, I T 5, with having borrowed an argument from 
 Badarayana. 
 
VEDANTA ON SPHO^A. 411 
 
 as actually the same. Thus when the word cow is pro- 
 nounced twice, we do not think that two words have been 
 pronounced, but that the same word has been pronounced 
 twice. And though two individuals may, no doubt, pro- 
 nounce the same word differently, such differences are due 
 to the organs of pronunciation, and not to the intrinsic 
 nature of the letters. He holds that the apprehension of 
 difference depends on external factors, but that their recog- 
 nition is due only to the intrinsic nature of the letters. The 
 sound which enters the ear (Dhvani) may be different, strong 
 or weak, high or low, but the letters through all this are 
 recognised as the same. And if it be said that the letters 
 of a word, being several, cannot form the object of one 
 mental act, this is not so, because the ideas which we have 
 of a row, or a wood, or an army, show that things which 
 comprise several unities can become objects of one and the 
 same act of cognition. And if it be asked why groups of 
 letters such as Pika and Kapi should convey different 
 meanings, viz. cuckoo and ape, we have only to look at 
 a number of ants, which as long as they move one after 
 another in a certain order, convey the idea of a row, but 
 cease to do so if they are scattered about at random, 
 
 Without adducing further arguments, /Samkara in the 
 end maintains that the admission of a Sphoa is unneces- 
 sary, and that it is simpler to accept the letters of a word 
 as having entered into a permanent connection with a de- 
 finite sense, and as always presenting themselves in a definite 
 order to our understanding, which, after apprehending the 
 several letters, finally comprehends the entire aggregate as 
 conveying a definite sense. We never perceive a Sphotfa, 
 he argues, and if the letters are supposed to manifest the 
 Sphoa, the Sphofo in turn would have to manifest the 
 sense. It would even be preferable to admit that letters 
 form a genus, and as such are eternal, but in either case 
 we should gain nothing by the Sphoa that we could not 
 have without it, by the admission of eternal words from 
 which all non-eternal things, such as gods, cows, and horses, 
 originated. Hence we see that, though the theory of the 
 Sphotfa is rejected by the Vedanta, the eternal character of 
 the words is strenuously retained, being considered essential, 
 
412 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 as it would seem, in order to maintain the identity of 
 Brahman and the Word, and the creation of the world by 
 Brahman in accordance with the eternal words. 
 
 Yoga and Sflwwkhya on 8phoa. 
 
 The Yoga-philosophy accepted the theory of the Sphoa, 
 nay it has been supposed to have first originated it J , for, 
 according to the commentary, it was against the Yoga 
 philosophers, rather than against the Mim&msa, that 
 Kapila's objections concerning the SphoZa were directed. 
 What Kapila says about Sphoa i&of much the same char- 
 acter as what he had said about Isvara, the Lord, namely 
 that its existence cannot be proved, not that it does not 
 exist. If Sphotfa, he says, is meant for the group of letters 
 forming a .word, then why not be satisfied with this, and 
 simply speak of a word (Pada), as manifesting its sense ? 
 Why invent something which has never been perceived, 
 and which exists as little apart from the letters as a forest 
 exists apart from the trees, what is in fact entirely gratuitous 
 
 (V,57). 
 
 Nor are the letters, from Kapila's point of view, eternal 
 (V, 58), because, as Badaraya^a also remarked, we can wit- 
 ness their production ; and our being able to recognise them 
 as the same, proves no more than their belonging to one and 
 the same genus, but not their being eternal. 
 
 It is curious to* observe the elaborateness with which 
 what seems to us a purely grammatical question is dis- 
 cussed in the various schools of Indian philosophy. The 
 Sphotfa, however, is to Indian thinkers not merely a gram- 
 matical problem ; it is distantly connected with the question 
 of the eternity of the Veda. This eternity is denied by 
 Kapila (Samkhya V, 46) because the Vedas speak of them- 
 selves as having been produced in such passages as : ' He 
 became heated, and from him, thus heated, the three Vedas 
 were produced.' Eternity of the Veda can therefore, ac- 
 cording to Kapila, mean no more than an unbeginning and 
 unbroken continuity, so that even at the beginning of a new 
 creation the order of words in the Veda remains the same 
 as before. But if, as Nyaya and Vaiseshika maintain, this 
 
 1 Garbe. S&wkhya-Philosophie, p. 1 1 1 u. 
 
NYYA ON SPHO^A. 413 
 
 Veda was the work of a personal being, such as Isvara, this 
 is declared impossible by Kapila, because, as he holds, such 
 an Isvara has never been proved to exist. For he holds that 
 the Lord or Isvara could only have been either a liberated 
 or an unliberated Purusha. Now a liberated Purusha, such 
 as Vishwa for instance, could not have composed this enor- 
 mous Veda, because he is free from all desires, nor could an 
 active, non-liberated Purusha have been the author, because 
 he would not have possessed the omniscience required for 
 such a work. 
 
 But we must not conclude that, because we know of no 
 possible personal author, therefore the Veda is eternal, in 
 the same way as germs and sprouts. What is called the 
 work of a personal being always presupposes a corporeal 
 person, and it presupposes a will. We should not call the 
 mere breathing of a person in sleep, a personal work. But 
 the Vedas, as we read, rise spontaneously like an exhalation 
 from the Highest Being, not by any effort of will, but by 
 some miraculous virtue. It must not be supposed that the 
 words of the Veda are manifested, like the notes of birds, 
 without any purpose or meaning. No, they are the means 
 of right knowledge, and their innate power is proved by 
 the wonderful effects which are produced, for instance, by 
 medical formulas taken from the Ayur-veda. This is the 
 same argument which .was used in the Nyaya-Sutras II, 68, 
 as a tangible and irrefutable proof of the efficiency of the 
 Vedas. Here all would depend on the experimental proof 3 
 and this the Hindus, ancient or modern, would find it diffi- 
 cult to supply ; but if tiie Hindus were satisfied, we have no 
 reason to find fault. 
 
 Hyfcya on Sphofe. 
 
 If now we turn to the Nyaya-philosophy we find that 
 Gotarna also denies the eternity of sound, because, it is 
 argued, we can see that it has a beginning or cause, because 
 it is an object of sense-perception, and because it is known 
 to be factitious. Besides, if sound were eternal, we should 
 be able to perceive it always, even before it is uttered, there 
 being no known barrier between the ether and our ear (II, 
 3, 86). This ethereal substratum of sound is, no doubt, 
 
414 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 intangible (II, 3, 104), but it is nevertheless a something 
 perceptible by one of our senses, that of hearing, and hence 
 it must be non-eternal. The true eternity of the Vedas 
 consists, according to Gotama, in the unbroken continuity of 
 their tradition, study, and employment, both in the Man- 
 vantaras and Yugas which are past and those that are still 
 to come, whilst their authority depends on the authority of 
 the most competent persons. This is the same with secular 
 words \ This; last admission would of course be strongly 
 resisted and resented by Vedanta philosophers, but it shows 
 at all events the freedom with which all Indian philo- 
 sophers were allowed to handle the ancient Sacred Books 
 of the country. 
 
 on Splio/a. 
 
 The Vaiseshikas lastly dp not differ much from the 
 Naiyayikas as to whether the Veda is eternal or not, is 
 authoritative or not, but they follow their own way of 
 reasoning. The very last Sutra of the Vaiseshika-Sastra, 
 X, z, 9, says: *It A has been declared that authoritativeness 
 belongs to the Amnaya (Veda) because it is uttered by 
 Him ' ; and this declaration is i ? ound likewise in the third 
 Sfttra of the first book to which the final Sutra refers. 
 But though this Sfttra is given -twice, there attaches some 
 uncertainty to its meaning, because, as pointed out by the 
 native commentators, the. words ' because uttered by Him/ 
 may also be translated by /because it declares it/ i.e. 'be- 
 cause it teaches duty (Dharma).' But in either case there 
 are objections, the same as those with which we are familiar 
 from the Purvapaksha in the Vedanta and Mmiiimsaka- 
 Sfttras, such as self-contradictoririess, tautology, and the 
 rest discovered by some critics in the text of the Vedas. 
 Thereupon the eternal character, too, of the Veda is called 
 in question, and whoever its author may have been, whether 
 human or divine, it is doubted whether he can justly claim 
 any authority. 
 
 In answer to this sweeping condemnation the Vaiseshika 
 points out VI, i, J, ' that at all events there is in the Veda 
 
 na's Commentary <m flu- Ny&ya. p. 91, eel. Biblioth. Indica, 
 Muir, O. S."T., III. }>. 115. 
 
INDRIYAS, SENSES. 415 
 
 a construction of sentences consequent upon intelligence/ 
 or as we should say, the Veda must at least be admitted 
 to be the work of a rational author, and not of an author 
 of limited intelligence, because no merely rational author 
 could propound such a rule as * He who desires paradise, 
 should sacrifice/ Such matters could not be known in their 
 causes and effects to men of limited knowledge like our- 
 selves. Whatever we may think of this -argument, it shoves 
 at all events the state of mind of the earliest defenders of 
 revelation. They argued that, because the author must at 
 least be admitted to 'have been a rational being, he could 
 not possibly have declared things that are beyond the 
 knowledge of ordinary rational beings, such as the rewards 
 of sacrifices in another world, and other matters beyond the 
 ken of experience. The Vaiseshikas admitted a persona] 
 author of the Veda, an tsvara, but this by no means in- 
 volved the eternity of the Veda. With the Vaiseshikcis, 
 also, the eternity of the Veda meant no more than its 
 uninterrupted tradition (Sarnpradaya), but some further 
 supports to its authority were found in the fact that. 
 besides being the work of a rational being, in this case 
 of fsvara, the Lord, it had been accepted as the highest 
 authority by a long line of the great or greatest men who 
 themselves might safely be regarded, if not as infallible, at 
 least a&, trust worthy and authoritative. 
 
 Prameyas, Objects of Hiaowlectg-e. 
 
 If now, after an examination of the various opinions 
 entertained by the Nyaya and other Hindu philosophers 
 of the significative power of words, we return to the SMras 
 of Gotama, we find that, in his third book, he is chiefly 
 concerned with the Prameyas. that is, the objects of know- 
 ledge, as established by the Prarna/nas ; and the first ques- 
 tion that meets us is whether the senses or Indriyas, the 
 instruments of objective knowledge, should be treated as 
 different from the Atman, the Self, or not. 
 
 Indriyas, 
 
 Gotama holds that they are different from the Atman ; 
 and in order to prove this, he argues, that if each sense 
 
41 6 INIJIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 could perceive by itself, each sense would perceive its own 
 object only, the ear sound, the eye colour, the skin warmth, 
 &c.; and that therefore what perceives all these impres- 
 sions together, at the same time and in the same object, 
 must^be something different from the several senses, namely 
 the Atman, or, according to other systems, the Manas or 
 mind. 
 
 arlra, Body. 
 
 Next follows the question whether the body is the same 
 as the Atman, a question which would never occur to 
 a Vedantist. But Gotama asks it and solves it in his 
 own way. It cannot be, he says, because, when the body 
 has once been destroyed by being burnt, the consequences 
 of good and evil deeds would cease to pursue the Self 
 through an endless series of births and rebirths. A 
 number of similar objections and answers follow, all 
 showing how much this question had occupied the thoughts 
 of the Nyaya philosophers. Some of them suggest difficul- 
 ties which betray a very low state of philosophical reason- 
 ing, while other difficulties are such that even in our own 
 time they have not ceased to perplex minute philosophers. 
 We meet with the question why, with the dual organ of 
 vision, there is no duality of perception ; why, if memory 
 is supposed to be a quality or mode of the Self, mere 
 remembrance of an acid substance can ma>ke our mouth 
 water. After these questions have been, if not solved, at 
 least carefully considered, Gotama goes on to show that if 
 the body be not Atman, neither can Manas, mind, be con- 
 ceived as the Atman. 
 
 Manas, Mind. 
 
 The Self is the kriower, while the mind or Manas is only 
 the instrument (Karar^a) of knowledge by which attention 
 is fixed on one thing at a time. The Self is eternal, not of 
 this life only, without beginning and therefore without 
 end. And here a curious argument is brought in, different 
 from the usual Indian arguments in support of our previous 
 existence, to show that our Self does not begin with our 
 birth on earth, because, as lie says, the smile of a new-born 
 child can only arise from memory of a previous experience. 
 
MANAS, MIND. 417 
 
 . 
 
 White our modern psycho-physiologists vouia probably 
 see in the smiles or the cries of a new-born child a reflex 
 action of the muscles, our Indian objector declares that such 
 movements are to be considered as no more than the open- 
 ing and closing of a lotus-flower. And when this view has 
 been silenced by the remark that a child does not consist 
 of the five elements only, is not in fact, as we should say 
 a mere vegetable, a new argument of the same character ie 
 adduced, namely the child's readiness to suck, which can 
 only be accounted for, they say, by the child having, in 
 a former life, acquired a desire for milk. When this again 
 has been rejected as no arguments because we see that iron 
 also moves towards a magnet, Gotarna answers once more 
 that a child cannot be treated like a piece of iron. And 
 when, as a last resource, desire in general, as manifested 
 by a child, is appealed to as showing a child's previous 
 existence, and when this also has once more been answered 
 by the remark that a child, like every other substance, 
 must be possessed of qualities, Gotama finally dismisses all 
 these objectors by maintaining that desires are not simply 
 qualities, but can arise from experience and previous 
 impressions (Sa7>ikalpa) only. 
 
 The consideration of the body and of the substances of 
 which it consists, whether of earth only, or of three 
 elements, earth, water and fire, or of four, earth, water, 
 fire and air, or of five, because it displays 'the qualities of 
 the five, is naturally of small interest in our time. The 
 i final solution only deserves our attention, in so far as it 
 clearly shows that the Nyaya also recognised in some cases 
 the authority of the Veda as supreme, by stating that the 
 body is made of earth, and why? '/Srutipr&rn&^yat,' 
 ' because scripture says so/ 
 
 What follows, the discussion of sight or of the visual ray 
 proceeding from the eye, and the question whether we 
 possess one general sense only, or many, may contain 
 curious suggestions for the psycho-physiologist ; but there 
 is little of what we mean by really philosophic matter in ii. 
 The qualities assigned to the objects of perception are not 
 very different from what they are supposed to be in the 
 other systems of philosophy, and they may be passed 
 
 27 
 
41 8 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 by here ail the more because they will have to be 1 con- 
 sidered more fully when we come to examine the Vaiseshika 
 system. 
 
 More interesting is the discussion which occupies the rest 
 of the third book. It is chiefly concerned with the nature 
 of Self (Atman), the mind (Manas), the difference between 
 the two, and their relation to knowledge. Here we should 
 remember that, according to I, 15, Buddhi (understanding), 
 Upalabdhi (apprehension), and (?/1&na (knowledge) are used 
 synonymously. Though there are many manifestations of 
 Manas,, such as memory, inference, verbal testimony, doubt, 
 imagination, dreaming, cognition, guessing, feeling of] 
 pleasure, desire, and all the rest, yet its distinguishing 
 feature, we are told, is what we should call attention, or as 
 Gotama explains it (I, 16), * the preventing of knowledge 
 arising altogether.' This is declared to be due to attention, 
 and in many cases this would be the best rendering of 
 Manas. Manas is therefore often called the doorkeeper, 
 preventing sensations from rushing in promiscuously and 
 all at once. If therefore we translate Manas by mind, we 
 must always remember its technical meaning in Indian 
 philosophy, and its being originally different from Buddhi, 
 understanding, which might often be rendered by light or 
 the internal light that changes dark and dull impressions 
 into clear and bright sensations, perceptions, and knowledge 
 in general, or by understanding, at least so far as it enables 
 us to transform and understand the dull impressions of the ' 
 senses. 
 
 The difference between the philosophical nomenclatures 
 in English and Sanskrit for the Manas and its various, 
 functions is so great that a translation is almost impossible, 
 and I am by no means satisfied with my own. It should 
 also be remembered that the same Sanskrit term has often: 
 very different meanings in different systems of philosophy. 
 
 The Buddhi of the Ny&ya philosophers, for instance, is 
 totally different from the Buddhi of the Sarakhyas. Their 
 Buddhi is eternal, while the Buddhi of Gotama is distinctly 
 declared to be non-eternal. The Buddhi of the Samkhya 
 is a cosmic principle independent of the Self, and meant to j 
 account for the existence of the light of reason in the whole ! 
 
MEMORY, 419 
 
 universe; while in the Nyaya-philosophy it signifies the 
 subjective activity of thought in the acquisition of know- 
 ledge, or in the lighting up and appropriating of the inert 
 impressions received by the senses. This knowledge can 
 come to an end and vanish by f orgetfulness, while an eternal 
 essence, like the Buddhi of the Samkhyas, though it may 
 be ignored, can never be destroyed. 
 
 Atman. 
 
 In answering the question, What is knowledge, Gotama 
 declares in this place quite clearly that real knowledge 
 belongs to the Atman only, the Self or the soul. It cannot 
 belong to the senses and their objects (Indriyartha), because 
 knowledge abides even when the senses and what they 
 perceive have been suppressed. Nor does knowledge 
 belong to the Manas, which is but the instrument of know- 
 ledge, but it arises from the conjunction of Atman (Self) 
 with Manas (attention), and on the other side of Manas 
 with Indriyas (senses). Manas is the instrument, and the 
 wielder of that instrument, like the wielder of an axe, 
 must be some one different from it ; this, according to the 
 Ny&ya, can only be the Self who in the end knows, who 
 remembers, who feels pain and pleasure, who desires and 
 acts. 
 
 Memory. 
 
 Memory, Smriti, has not received from Indian philo- 
 sophers the attention which it deserves. If it is treated as 
 a means of knowledge, it falls under Anubhava, which is 
 either immediate or mediate, and then called Smriti. Every 
 Anubhava is supposed to leave an impression or modifica- 
 tion of the mind, which is capable of being revived. There 
 is another manifestation of memory in the act of remember- 
 ing or recognising, as when on seeing a man we say, This is 
 he, or This is Devadatta. Here we have Anubhava, know- 
 ledge of this, joined with something else, namely he or 
 Devadatta, a revived Samskara, impression, or Sm?vti. The 
 subject of memory is more fully treated in III, 113, and the 
 various associations which awaken memory are enumerated 
 as follows : 
 
420 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 1. Attention to an object perceived ; 
 
 2. Connection, as when the word Pram&Tia, p/oof, recalls 
 ^rameya, what has to be proved ; 
 
 3. Repetition, as when crie has learned a number of thing? 
 together, one calls up the other ; 
 
 4. A sign, as when a thing recalls its sine qua non ; 
 
 ,5. A mark, as when a standard reminds one of its 
 bearer; 
 
 6. Likeneas, as when one body recalls a similar bocly , 
 
 7. Possession, as when a property reminds us of its 
 owner : 
 
 8. Belonging:, as when royal attendants remind us of the 
 king; 
 
 9. Relation, as when a disciple reminds us of the teacher, 
 or kine of a bull ; 
 
 10. Succession, as when the pounding 01 rice reminds one 
 of sprinkling ; 
 
 j i. Absence, as of a wife ; 
 
 12. Fellow- workers, as when one disciple reminds us of 
 the co-disciples ; 
 
 13. Opposition, as when the ichneumon recalls the 
 snake ; 
 
 14. Pre-eminence, as when investiture with the sacred 
 string recalls the principal agent, the Guru or teacher ; 
 
 15. Receiving, as when a gift reminds one of the giver; 
 
 16. Covering, as when a sword reminds one of the 
 sheath ; 
 
 1 7. Pleasure and pain, eacK of which recalls the occasioner 
 of it; 
 
 1 8. Desire and aversion, reminding us of their causes ; 
 
 19. Fear, reminding us of what is feared, such as death; 
 
 20. Want, which makes us think of those who can supply 
 our wants ; 
 
 21. Motion, as when a shaking branch reminds us of the 
 wind; 
 
 22. Affection, reminding us of a son, &c. ; 
 
 23. Merit and Demerit, which make us reflect on joys 
 and sorrows of a former life. 
 
 Such lists are very characteristic of Hindu philosophy, 
 and they show at the same time that it is a mistake to 
 
MORE PRAMEYAS. 421 
 
 ascribe them exclusively to the Samk&ya-philosophy. 
 Though they do not add much to our knowledge of the 
 fundamental tenets of 'Indian philosophy, they show once 
 more how much thought had been spent in the elaboration 
 of mere details ; and this, as we are tolfl in this case by 
 the commentator himself, chiefly in order to stir up the 
 thoughts of the learners, /Sishyavyutpadanaya, to indepen- 
 dent activity. 
 
 Knowledge not Sternal. 
 
 The important point, however, which Gotama wishes to 
 establish is this, that knowledge, though belonging to the 
 eternal Self, is not in itself eternal, but vanishes like any 
 other act. He also guards against the supposition that as 
 we seem to take in more than one sensation at the same 
 time, as in eating a cake full of different kinds of sweets, 
 we ought to admit more than one Manas ; and he explains 
 that this simultaneousness of perception is apparent only, 
 just as the fiery circle is when we whirl a firebrand with 
 grea f . rapidity, or as we imagine that a number of palm- 
 leaves are pierced by a pin at one blow, and not in 
 succession, one after the other. Lastly, he states that the 
 Manas is Anu, infinitely small, or, as we should say, an 
 atom. 
 
 More Prameyas. 
 
 While the third book 'was occupied with the first six of 
 the Prameyas, or objects to be known and proved, including 
 the whole apparatus of knowledge, such as Atman, Self or 
 soul, Indriyas, senses, Manas, mind, central sensorium, 
 Buddhi, understanding, and $arira, body, and therefore 
 gave rise to some important questions not only of meta- 
 )hysics, but of psychology also, the fourth book which is 
 levoted to the remaining six Prameyas, such as (7) Pra- 
 vritti (activity), (8) Dosha (faults), (9) Pretyabhava (trans- 
 Inrigration), (10) Phala (rewards), (n) DuAkha (pain), and 
 J(i2) Apavarga (final beatitude), is naturally of a more 
 .(practical character, and less attractive to the student of 
 ithe problems of being and thinking. Some questions, how- 
 jever, are treated in it* which cannot well be passed over, if 
 
422 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 we wish to give a full insight into the whole character, and 
 the practical bearing of the Nyaya-philosophy. 
 
 Though this philosophy is supposed to represent Indian 
 logic only, we have already seen enough of it to know that 
 it included almost every question within the sphere of 
 philosophy and religion, and that its chief object was the 
 same as that of all the other systems of Indian philosophy, 
 namely salvation. 
 
 Life after Death. 
 
 One of the seven interesting subjects treated here 
 is Pretyabhava, literally existence after having departed 
 this life, and this is proved in a very short way. As the 
 Self has been proved to be eternal, Gotama says (IV, 10) it 
 follows that it will exist after what is called death. Some 
 of the objections made to this tenet are easily disposed of, 
 but nothing is said to establish what is meant by trans- 
 migration, that is being born again in another world as 
 either a human or as some other animal being, or even as 
 a plant. 
 
 Existence of Deity. 
 
 Another important subject, if it is not passed over alto- 
 gether, is treated by Gotama, as it was by Kapila, inci- 
 dentally only, I mean the existence of a Deity. It comes 
 in when a problem of the Buddhists is under discussion . 
 namely, whether the world came out of nothing, and 
 whether the manifestation of anything presupposes the 
 destruction of its cause. This is illustrated by the f act- 
 that the seed has to perish before the flower can appear. 
 But Gotama strongly denies this, and reminds the opponent 
 that if the seed were really destroyed by being pounded or 
 burnt, the flower would never appear. Nor could it be 
 said that the flower, if it had not existed previously, 
 destroyed the seed, while, if it had, it would have owed its 
 existence to the simple destruction of the seed. Therefore, 
 he continues, as nothing can be produced from nothing, nor 
 from an annihilated something, like a seed, the world also 
 cannot have sprung from nothingness, but requires the 
 admission of an Lsvara, the Lord, as its real cause. And 
 
CAUSE AND EFFECT. 423 
 
 this admission of an tsvara, even though in the capacity 
 of a governor rather than of a maker of the world, is con- 
 firmed by what was evidently considered by Gotama as 
 a firmly established truth, namely, that every act of man 
 invariably produces its result, though not by itself, but 
 under the superintendence of some one, that is, of Isvara. 
 We then meet with a new argument, different from that of 
 the Mim&'msakas, namely that, if work done continued to 
 work- entirely by itself, the fact that some good or evil 
 deeds of men do not seem to receive their reward would 
 remain unaccounted for. This is certainly a curious way 
 of proving tl 3 existence of God by the very argument 
 which has generally been employed by those who want to 
 orove His non-existence. Gotarna's real ^object, however, 
 is to refute the Buddhist theory of vacuity (/Sftnya), or of 
 Nothing being the cause of the world, and afterwards to 
 disprove the idea that effects can ever be fortuitous. And 
 as Gotama differs from Gautama in denying the origin of 
 the world out of nothing, he also differs from the Samkhya 
 philosophers, who hold that all things, as developed out of 
 Prakriti, are real only so long as they are noticed by the 
 Purusha. He holds, on the contrary, that some things are 
 real and eternal, but others are not, because we actually 
 see both their production and their destruction. If we 
 were to doubt this, we should doubt what has been settled 
 by the authority of all men, and there would be an end of 
 all truth and untruth. This 1 is a novel kind of argument 
 for an Indian philosopher to use, and shows that with all 
 the boldness of their speculations they were not so entirely 
 different from ourselves, and not entirely indifferent to the 
 Securu8 judicat or bis terrarum. 
 
 Cause and Effect. 
 
 If, however, we call the Nyaya-philosophy theistic, we 
 should always remember that such terms as theistic and 
 atheistic are hardly applicable to Indian philosophy in the 
 sense in which they are used by Christian theologians. 
 With us atheistic implies the denial of a supreme and 
 
 1 SHrvalfukikapram&tva. 
 
424 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY, 
 
 absolute Being , but we saw that even the so-called atneism 
 of the Samkhya-philosophy does not amount to that. It is 
 simply the denial of an tsvara, as an active and persopal 
 creator and ruler of the world. 
 
 And even such a personal God is not altogether denied 
 by the Samkhyas ; they only deny that He can be proved 
 to exist by human arguments, and it* He exists as such, 
 tht>y hold that in the eyes of philosophers He would be but 
 a phenomenal manifestation of the Godhead, liable to 
 change, liable even to temporary disappearance at the end 
 of each aeon, and to reappearance at the beginning of 
 a new aeon. It is this kind of a divine being, a personal 
 Isvara or Lord, that is taken for granted by the Nyaya 
 philosophers, and, it may be added at once, by the Vaise- 
 shika philosophers also ] . 
 
 In the Tarka-Samgraha, for instance, it is distinctly 
 stated that l the Atman or Self is twofold, the (rivatman 
 (personal Self), and the Paramatman (the Highest Self)/ 
 It must not be supposed, however, that Isvara, the omni- 
 scient Lord, is Patamatman, which is one only, while the 
 Crivatman is separate for each individual body, all-per- 
 vading and eternal. Though Paramatman is Isvara, Isvara 
 is not Paramatman, but a phenomenal manifestation of 
 Paramatman only. The argument which we met with 
 before is fully stated in Catania's Sutras, IV, 19-21. The 
 actions of men, it is said, do not always produce an effect, 
 Good actions do not always produce good results, nor bad 
 action ,s bad results, as they ought, if every act continued to 
 act (Karman). Hence there must be another power that 
 modifies the continuous acting of acts, and that can be 
 Isvara only. It is not denied thereby that human actions 
 are required, and that no effects would take place without 
 the working of human agents, only they are not the sole 
 cause of what happens, but we require another power, an 
 Isvara, to account for what would otherwise be irrational 
 results of human actions. 
 
 Baliantyne, Christianity contrasted with Hindu Philosophy, p. 12 : 
 Muir, O. S. T., vol. iii, p. 133. 
 
EMANCIPATION. 425 
 
 Fhala, Stewards. 
 
 We now come to the tenth of the Prameyas, Phala ; and 
 here the same subject is treated once more, though from 
 a different point of view. It is asked, how are effects, 
 rewards or punishments, possible in another life ? As both 
 good and evil works are done in this life, the cause, namely 
 these works, would have ceased to exist long before their 
 fruit Is to be gathered. This objection is met by an illus- 
 tration taken from a tree which bears fruit long after it 
 has ceased to be watered. The objector is not, however, 
 satisfied with this, but, on the contrary, takes a bolder 
 step, and denies that any effect either is or is not, at 
 the same time. Gotama is not to be frightened by this 
 apparently Buddhistic argument, but appeals again to what 
 we should call the common-sense view of the matter, 
 namely, that we actually see production and destruction 
 before our very eyes. We can see every day that a cloth, 
 before it has been woven, does not exist, for no weaver 
 would say that the threads are the cloth, or the cloth the 
 threads. And if it should be argued that the 'fruit pro- 
 duced by a tree is different from the fruit of our acts, 
 because there is no receptacle (Asraya) or, as we should 
 say, no subject, this is met by the declaration that, in the 
 case of good or bad acts, there is a permanent receptacle, 
 namely the Self, which alone is capable of perceiving pain 
 or joy in this or in any other state of existence. 
 
 Emancipation 
 
 After examining the meaning of pain, and expressing his 
 conviction that everything, even pleasure, is full of pain, 
 Gotarna ab last approaches the last subject, emancipation 
 (Apavarga). He begins as usual with objections, such as 
 that it is impossible in this life to pay all our moral debts, 
 that certain sacrificial duties are enjoined as incumbent on 
 us to the end of our lives, and that if it is said that a man 
 is freed from these by old age, this does not imply that, 
 even when he is no longer able to perform his daily duties, 
 he should not perform certain duties, if in thought only. 
 If, therefore, good works continue, there will be rewards 
 
426 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 for them, in fact there will be paradise, though even this 
 would really have to be looked upon as an obstacle to real 
 emancipation. Nothing remains but a complete extinction 
 of all desires, and this can be effected by knowledge of the 
 truth only. Therefore knowledge of 'the truth or removal 
 of all false notions, is the beginning and end of all philo- 
 sophy, and of the Nyaya-philosophy in particular. The 
 first step towards this is the cessation of Aha,mkara, here 
 used in the sense of personal feelings, such as desire for 
 a beautiful and aversion to a deformed object. Desire 
 therefore has to be eradicated and aversion also ; but before 
 he explains how this desire, w r hich arises from false appre- 
 hension (Mithyagwaiia) can be eradicated, Gotama is carried 
 back once more to a subject which had been discussed 
 before, namely whether the objects of desire exist as wholes 
 or as parts. And this leads him on to what is the distin- 
 guishing doctrine both of the Nyaya and of the Vaiseshika- 
 philosophies, namely the admission of Anus or atoms. If 
 wholes are constantly divided and subdivided, we should 
 in the end be landed in nihilism, but this is not to be. 
 There cannot be annihilation because the A-nus or the 
 smallest parts are realities (IV, 8-82), and, according to 
 their very nature, cannot be further reduced or compressed 
 out of being. Against this view of the existence of what we 
 should call atoms, the usual arguments are then adduced, 
 namely that ether (or space) is everywhere, and therefore 
 in an atom also, and if an atom has figure or a without and 
 a within, it is of necessity divisible. In reply, ether is said 
 to be intangible, neither resistant nor obstructing, that is, 
 neither occupying space against others, nor preventing 
 others from occupying space ; and in the end an appeal is 
 made to a recognised maxim of Hindu philosophy, that 
 there must never be a regressio in infinity m,) as there would 
 be in attempting to divide an atom. 
 
 Knowledge of Ideas, not of Things. 
 
 And now the opponent, again, it would seem, a E'iddhist, 
 makes a still bolder sweep by denying the existence of any 
 external things. All we have is knowledge, he says, not 
 things; nothing different from our knowledge, or inde- 
 
SYLLOGISM. 427 
 
 pendent of our knowledge, can exist for us. Gotama 
 objects to this (Vidyamatra) doctrine, first of all because, if 
 it were impossible to prove the existence of any external 
 things, it would be equally impossible to prove their non- 
 existence. And if an appeal were made to dreams, or 
 visions produced by a mirage, or by jugglery, it should be 
 remembered that dreams also, like remembrances, presup- 
 pose previous perception of things ; and that even in mis- 
 taking we mistake something, so that false knowledge can 
 always be removed by true knowledge. After granting 
 that, one more question arises, how that true knowledge, 
 if once gained, is to be preserved, because we saw that 
 knowledge is not eternal, but vanishes. And here the 
 Nyaya suddenly calls the Yoga to its aid, and teaches that 
 Samadhi or intense meditation will prove a safe preserva- 
 tive of knowledge, in spite of all disturbances from without, 
 while the Nyaya-philosophy retains its own peculiar use- 
 fulness as' employed in the defence of truth against all 
 comers, in which case even such arts as wrangling and 
 cavilling may prove of service. 
 
 This may seem a very humble view to take with regard 
 to a system of philosophy which at the very outset promised 
 to its students final beatitude as the highest reward. But 
 considering the activity of philosophical speculation, of 
 which- we have had so many indications in the ancient as 
 well asjn the modern history of India, we can well under- 
 stand that philosophers, skilled in all the arts and artifices 
 of reasoning, would secure for their system that high posi- 
 tion which the Nyaya certainly held and still holds 1 among 
 the recognised systems of orthodox philosophy. It would 
 be useless to go once more over the topics from ?ati, 
 futility, No. XIV, to No, XVI, Nigrahasthana, objectionable 
 proceedings, which are fully treated in the fifth book. 
 
 Syllogism. 
 
 There is one subject, however, which requires some more 
 special consideration, namely the Syllogism, or the Five 
 Members, treated as VII. This has always excited the 
 
 1 Cowell, Report on the Toles 01 ^ uddea, 1867. 
 
428 TtfDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 special interest of European logicians on account of certain 
 startling similarities which no doubt exist between it and 
 the syllogism of Aristotle and the schoolman. But from 
 a Hindu point of view this syllogism or even logic in 
 general is by no means the chief object of the Nyaya- 
 philosophy, nor is it its exclusive property. It has been 
 tully discussed in the Vedanta and S&mkhya systems, and 
 on<& more in the Vaiseshika ; but as it forms the pride of 
 the Nyya, it will find its most appropriate place here l . 
 
 As we saw colour mentioned as the distinguishing quality 
 of light, we found knowledge put forward as the char- 
 acteristic feature of Self. The Nyaya looks upon know- 
 ledge as inseparably connected with the Self, though in the 
 larger sense of being the cause of every conception that has 
 found expression in language. Knowledge, according to 
 the Nyaya, is either perception or remembrance. Percep- 
 tion again is twofold, right or wrong. Right perception 
 represents a thing such as it is, silver as silver. This is called 
 truth, Prama. Wrong perception represents a thing as it 
 is not, mother-of-pearl as silver. 
 
 This right perception, according to the Nyaya-philosophy 
 is, as we saw, of four kinds, sensuous, inferential, com- 
 parative, and authoritative, and is produced by perception, 
 by inference, by comparison, and by revealed authority. 
 Here we are brought back to the Pramanas again which 
 were discussed in the beginning, but among which one, 
 Anumana or inference, receives here a more special treat- 
 ment. We are thus obliged, in following the Sdtras, to 
 go over some of the ground again. Different systems of 
 philosophy differed, as we saw, in the number of Pram&ftas 
 which they admit, according to what each considers the 
 only trustworthy channels of knowledge. 
 
 Pram&nas in different Philosophical Schools. 
 
 One, Perception : .ATarv&kas. 
 
 Two, Perception and inference: Vaiseshikas arid Buddhists. 
 
 1 See M. M., Appendix to Archbishop Thomson's Laws of Thought j 
 also Die Theorie df-s indischeu Rationaliaten von den Erkenninissmitteln, 
 von R. Gar be, 1888. 
 
PRAMAJ^AS IN DIFFERENT PHILOSOPHICAL SCHOOLS. 429 
 Three, Perception, inference, and word (revelation) 
 
 Four, Perception, inference, revelation, and comparison 
 Naiy&yikas. 
 
 Five, Perception, inference, revelation, comparison, and 
 presumption : Prabh&kara (a Mim&rasaka) 
 
 Six, Perception, inference, revelation, comparison, pre- 
 sumption, and not-being : MimUmsakas. 
 
 Otners admit also Aitihya, tradition, Sambhava, equiva- 
 lence, Keshth, gesture. 
 
 After sensuous knowledge, which take? cognisance of 
 substances, qualities, and actions, has been examined, the 
 question arises, how can we know things which are not 
 brought to us by the senses? How do we know, for 
 instance, that there is fire which we cannot see in a moun- 
 tain, or that a mountain is a volcano, when all that we do 
 see is merely that the mountain smokes? We should 
 remember that there were three kinds of Anum&na (Ny&ya- 
 S&tras II, 37) called Pftrvavat, having the sign before, or 
 as the ' cause, $eshavat, having the sign after or as the 
 effect, and Srn&nyatodrisha, seen together. In the first 
 cla-ss the sign of past rain was the swelling of rivers ; in 
 the second the sign of coming rain was the ants carrying 
 off their eggs ; in the third the sign of the motion of the 
 sun was its being seen in different places. Knowledge of 
 things unseen, acquired in these three ways, is called in- 
 ferential knowledge (Anum&na), and in order to arrive at 
 it, we are told that we must be in possession of what is 
 called a Vy&pti. This, as we saw, was the most important 
 word in an Indian syllogism. Literally it means pervasion. 
 Vypta meanp pervaded ; Vy&pya, what must be pervaded ; 
 Vy&paka, wjb^t pervades. This expression, to pervade, is 
 used by logicians in the sense of invariable, inseparable or 
 universal concomitance. Thus sea-water is always per- 
 vaded by saltness, it is inseparable from it, and in this 
 aense Vy&pya, what is to be pervaded, came to be used 
 for whatJ we should call the middle term in a syllogism. 
 Vy&pti, or invariable Concomitance, may sometimes be 
 taken as a general rule, or even as a general law, in some 
 cases it is simply the sine qud non. It is such a Vy&pti, 
 
430 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 for instance, that smoke is pervaded by 01 invariably con- 
 nected with fire, or, as the Hindus say, that smokiness is 
 pervaded by fieriness, not, however, fieriness by smokiness. 
 We arrive by induction at the Vyapti that wherever there 
 is smoke, there is lire, but not that wherever there is fire, 
 there is smoke. The latter Vy&pti in order to be true 
 would require a condition or Upadhi, viz. that the firewood 
 should be moist. If we once are in possession of a true 
 Vy&pti as smokiness being pervaded by fieriness, we only 
 require what is called groping or consideration (Paramarsa) 
 in order to make the smoke, which we see rising from the 
 mountain, a Paksha or member of our Vyapti, such as 
 'wherever there is smoke, there is fire.' The conclusion 
 then follows that this mountain which shows smoke, must 
 have fire. 
 
 All this may sound very clumsy to European logicians, 
 but it would have been easy enough to translate it into 
 our own more technical language. We might easily clothe 
 KaTiada in a Grecian garb and make him look almost" like 
 Aristotle. Instead of saying that inferential knowledge 
 arises from discovering in an object something which is 
 always pervaded by something else, and that the pervading 
 predicate is predicable of all things of which the pervaded 
 predicate is, we might have said that our knowledge that 
 b is P arises from discovering that S is M, and M iS P, or 
 with Aristotle, 6 (rv\\oyi<rp.bs 6ta rov ^aov TO anpov ra> rptra) 
 bctKwa-iv. What KaTiada call& one member of the pervasion, 
 Paksha, e.g. the smoking mountain, might have been trans- 
 lated by subject or terminus minor] what pervades, 
 Vyapaka or Sadhya, e. g. fieriness, by predicate or terminus 
 major; and what is to be pervaded, Vyapy a, i.e. smokiness, 
 by terminus medius. But what should we have gained 
 by this ? AH that is peculiar to Indian logic would have 
 evaporated, and the remainder might have been taken for 
 a clumsy imitation of Aristotle. Multa fiunt eadem, sed 
 aliter, and it is this very thing, this aliter, that constitutes 
 the principal charm of a comparative study of philosophy. 
 Even such terms as syllogism or conclusion are incon- 
 venient here, because they have with us an historical 
 Colouring and may throw a false light on the subject. The 
 
ANUMANA FOR OTHERS. 43! 
 
 Sanskrit Anumara is not exactly the Greek 
 but it means measuring something by means of something 
 else. This is done by what we may call syllogism, but 
 what the Hindus describe as Paramarsa or groping or 
 trying to find in an object something which can be measured 
 by something else or what can become the member of 
 a pervasion. This corresponds in fact to the looking for 
 a terminus medius. In Kapila's system (1, 61) the principal 
 object -of inference is said to be transcendent truth that is, 
 truth which transcends the horizon of our senses. Things 
 which cannot be seen with our eyes, are known by in- 
 ference, as fire is, when what is seen is smoke only. 
 Gotama therefore defines the result of inference (I, 101) as 
 knowledge of the connected, that is, as arising from the 
 perception of a connection or a law. But, again, the rela- 
 tion of what pervades and what is pervaded is very different 
 from what we should call the relative extension of two 
 concepts. This will become more evident as we proceed. 
 For the present we must remember that in the case before 
 us the act of proving by means of Anurnana consists in our 
 knowing that there is in the mountain something always 
 pervaded by, or inseparable from something else, in our 
 case, smoke always pervaded by fire, and that therefore the 
 mountain, if it smokes, has fire. 
 
 By this process we arrive at Anumiti, the result of 
 Anumana, or inferential knowledge, that the mountain is 
 a volcano. So much for the inference for ourselves. Next 
 follows the inference for others. 
 
 Annm&na for Others. 
 
 What follows is taken from Annambha^a's Compendium. 
 'The act of concluding/ he says, 'is twofold, it being 
 intended either for one's own benefit or for the benefit of 
 others. The former is the means of arriving at knowledge 
 for oneself, and the process is this. By repeated observa- 
 tion, as in the case of kitchen hearths and the like, we are 
 reminded of a rule (Vypti), such as that wherever we 
 have seen smoke, we have seen fire. We now approach 
 a mountain and wonder whether there may or may not be 
 fire in it. We see the smoke, we remember the rule, and 
 
432 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY, 
 
 immediately perceive that the mountain itself is fierv This 
 is the process when we reason for ourselves. 
 
 But if we have to convince somebody else of whrt we, 
 by inference, know to be true, the case is different We 
 then start with the assertion, The mountain is fiery, We 
 are asked, Why? and we answer, Because it smokes. 
 We then give our reason, or the major premiss, that all 
 that smokes is fiery, as you may see, for instance, on a 
 kitchen hearth and the like. Now you perceive that the 
 mountain does smoke, and hence you will admit that I was 
 right when I said that the mountain is fiery. This is called 
 the fivermembered form of exposition, and the five members 
 are severally called *, 
 
 (i) Assertion (Prati#/?H), the mountain has fire; 
 (Q.) Reason (Hetu 2 ), because it has smoke , 
 
 (3) Instance (Ud&harana or Nidarsana), look at the 
 kitchen hearth, and remember the Vy&pti between smoke 
 and fire ; 
 
 (4) Application (Upanaya), and the mountain has smoke ; 
 
 (5) Conclusion (Nigamana), therefore it has fire V 
 
 In both cases the process of inference is the same, but 
 the second is supposed to be more rhetorical, more per- 
 suasive, and therefore more useful in controversy. 
 
 What is called by Annambhafta the conclusion for 
 oneself, corresponds totidem verbis to the first form of 
 Aristotle's syllogism: 
 
 All that smokes is fiery, 
 The mountain smokes; 
 Therefore the mountain is fiery. 
 
 We must not forget, however, that whatever there is 
 of formal Logic in these short extracts, has but one object 
 with Gotama, that of describing knowledge as one of the 
 qualities of the Self, and as this knowledge is not confined 
 to sensuous perceptions, Gotama feit it incumbent on him 
 to explain the nature and prove the legitimacy of the in- 
 ferential kind of knowledge also It is not so much logic 
 
 1 ny&ya-Sutras I, 39. 
 
 8 Synonyms of Hetu are Apade** T.iwisa. Framana, and Karana. 
 Vai*eshika-Sutras IX, a, 4. 
 
 3 The Vaiseshika terms are (i) Pratigrfta, (a) Apadea, (3) Nidarsana, 
 (4) Anusawdhana, (5) Pratyamnaya. 
 
ANUMiNA FOR OTHERS. 433 
 
 as ii is noetic that interested KaTiada. He was clearly 
 aware of the inseparability of inductive and deductive 
 reasoning The formal logician, from the time of Aris- 
 totle to our own, takes a purely technical interest in the 
 machinery of the human mind, he collects, he arranges 
 and analyses the functions of our reasoning faculties, as 
 they fall under his observation. But the question which 
 occupies Gotama is, How it is that we know any thing 
 which we do not, nay which we cannot perceive by our 
 senses, in fact, how we can justify inferential knowledge. 
 From this point of view we can easily see that neither in- 
 duction nor deduction, if taken by itself, would be sufficient 
 for him. Deductive reasoning may in itself be most useful 
 for forming Vyaptis, it may give a variety of different 
 aspects to our knowledge, but it can never add to it. And 
 if on one side Gotama cannot use deduction, because it 
 teaches nothing new, he cannot on the other rely entirely 
 on induction, because it cannot teach anything ceitain or 
 unconditional. 
 
 The only object of all knowledge, according to Gotama, 
 is absolute truth or Prama. He knew as well as Aristotle 
 that 7rayo>y?/ in order to prove the oXcos must be 6ta -navTav, 
 and that this is impossible. Knowledge gained by epagogic 
 reasoning is, strictly speaking, always tnl TO TTO'AV, and not 
 what Gotama would call Prama. The conclusion, f. i., at 
 which Aristotle arrives by way of induction, that animals 
 with little bile are long-lived, might be called a Vyapti. 
 He arrives at it by sa"ying that man, horse, and mule (C) 
 are long-lived (A) ; man, horse, and mule (C) have little bile 
 (B); therefore all animals with little bile are long-lived. 
 Gotama does not differ much from this, but he would 
 3xpress himself in a different way. He would say, wher- 
 ever we see the attribute of little oile, we also see the 
 attribute of long life, s for instance in men, horses, mules, 
 &c. But there he would not stop. He would value this 
 Vyapti merely as a means of establishing a new rule ; he 
 would use it as a means of deduction and say, ' Now we 
 know that the elephant has little bile, therefore we know 
 also that he is long-lived/ Or to use another instance, 
 where Aristotle -says that all men are mortal. Kanada 
 
 28 * f 
 
434 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 would say that humanity is pervaded by mortality, or that 
 we have never seen humanity without mortality; and 
 where Aristotle concludes that kings are mortal because 
 they belong to the class of men, Gotama, if he argued for 
 himself only, and not for others, would say that kinghood 
 is pervaded by manhood and manhood by mortality, and 
 therefore kings are mortal. 
 
 I*' would be easy to bring objections against this kind of 
 reasoning, and we shall see that Indian philosophers them-' 
 selves have not been slow in bringing them forward, and 
 likewise in answering them. One thing can be said in 
 favour of the Indian method. If we go on accumulating 
 instances to form an induction, if, as in the afore-men- 
 tioned case, we add horses, mules, men, and the like, we 
 approximate no doubt more and more to a general rule, 
 but we never eliminate all real, much less all possible, 
 exceptions. The Hindu, on the contrary, by saying, 
 ' Wherever we have seen the attribute of little bile, we have 
 observed long life/ or better still, ' We have never observed 
 long life without the attribute of little bile/ and by then 
 giving a number of mere instances, and these by w&y of 
 illustration only, excludes the reality, though not the pos- 
 sibility, of exceptions. He states, as a fact, that wherever 
 the one has been, the other has been seen likewise, and 
 thus throws the onus proba/ndi as to any case to the con- 
 trary upon the other side. The Hindu knows the nature 
 of induction quite well enough to say in the very words of 
 European philosophers, that because in ninety-nine cases 
 a Vystpti 1 or rule has happened to be true, it does not 
 follow that it will be so in the hundredth case. If it can 
 be proved, however, that there never has been an instance 
 where smoke was seen without fire,' .the mutual inherence 
 and inseparable connection of smoke and fire is more firmly 
 established than it would be by any r umber of accumulated 
 actual instances where the two have been seen together. 
 
 The conditions (Upadhis) under which it is allowable to 
 form a Vy&pti, that is to say, to form a universal rule, 
 have greatly occupied the thoughts of Hindu philosophers. 
 
 1 'SatasaA sahaftaritayor api vyabhi&aropalabdheA.' Anumaiiiakhanda 
 of Tattvafrint&mani/ 
 
ANUMANA FOB. OTHERS. 435 
 
 Volumes after volumes have Deen written on the subject, 
 and though they may not throw any new light on the origin 
 of universals, they furnish at all events a curious parallel 
 to the endeavours of European philosophers in defence both 
 of inductive and deductive thinking. 
 
 It seems hardly time as yet to begin to criticise the in- 
 ductive and the deductive methods as elaborated by Hindu 
 philosophers. We must first know them more fully. Such 
 objections as have hitherto been started were certainly not 
 unknown to Gotarna and Kanada themselves. In accord- 
 ance with their system of Purvapaksha and Uttarapaksha, 
 every conceivable objection was started by them and care- 
 fully analysed and answered. Thus it has been pointed 
 out by European philosophers that the proposition that 
 wherever there is smoke there is fire, would really lose its 
 universal character 1 by the introduction of the instance, 
 ' as on the kitchen hearth/ But the Hindu logicians also 
 were perfectly aware of the fact that this instance is not 
 essential to a syllogism. They look upon the instance 
 simply as a helpful reminder for controversial purposes, as 
 an illustration to assist the memory, not as an essential 
 part of the process of the proof itself. It is meant to 
 remind us that we must look out for a Vyapti between the 
 .smoke which we see, and the fire which is implied, but not 
 seen. It is therefore in rhetorical syllogisms or syllogisms 
 for others only that the instance has its proper place. In 
 Sfttra I, 35 Gotama says, * The third member or example 
 is c some familiar case of the fact which, through its having 
 a character which is invariably attended by that which 
 is to be established, establishes (in conjunction with the 
 reason) the existence of that character which is to be 
 established/ It is Indian rhetoric therefore far more than 
 Indian logic that is responsible for the introduction of this 
 third member which Contains the objectionable instance; 
 and rhetoric, though it is not logic, yet, as Whately says, is 
 an offshoot of logic. 
 
 1 Ritter, History of Philosophy, IV, p. 365,, says that ' two members 
 of Kanada's -argument are evidently superfluous, while, by the intro- 
 duction of an example in the third, the universality of the conclusion 
 is vitiated.' 
 
436 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 The fact is that Gotama cares far more or the formation 
 of a Vy&pti, pervasion, than for the manner in which it 
 may serve hereafter as the basis of a syllogism, which must 
 depend on the character of the . Vy&pti. A Vy&pti was 
 considered as threefold in the school of Gotama, as Anvaya- 
 vyatireki, Kevalanvayi, and Kevala-vyatireki. The first, 
 the Anvaya-vyatireki, present and absent, is illustrated by 
 such a case as, Where there is smoke, there is fire, and 
 where firo is not, smoke is not. The second, or Ke\-al&n- 
 vayi, i.e. present only, is illustrated by such a case as, 
 Whatever is cognisable is nameable, where it is impossible 
 to bring forward anything that is not cognisable. The 
 third case, or Kevala-vyatireki, is illustrated by a case 
 such as, Earth is different from the other elements, because 
 it is odorous. Here we could not go on and say, all that 
 is different from the other elements has odour, because the 
 only case in point (Ud&haraTia) would again be earth. 
 But we have to say, what is not different from the other 
 elements is not odorous, as water (by itself). But this 
 earth is not so, is not inodorous, and therefore it is not 
 not-different from the other elements, but different from 
 them, q.e.d. 
 
 . Much attention has also been paid by Hindu philoso- 
 phers to the working o the Upadhis or conditions assigned 
 to a Vy&pti. Thus in the ordinary Vyapti that there is 
 smoke in a mountain, because there is fire, the presence of 
 wet fuel was an Upadhi, or indispensable condition. This 
 Up&dhi pervades what is to be established (S&dhya-vy&- 
 paka), in this case, fire, but it does not pervade what 
 establishes (SMhana-vyapaka), i.e. smoke, because fire is 
 not pervaded by or invariably accompanied by wet fuel, 
 as, for instance, in the case of a red-hot iron ball, where 
 we have really fire without smoke. Hence it would not 
 follow by necessity that there is fire uecause there is smoke, 
 or that there is no fire because there is no smoke. How 
 far the Indian mind may go in these minutiae of reasoning 
 may be seen from the following instance given by Dr. Bal- 
 lantyne in his Lectures on the Nyaya-philosophy, founded 
 chiefly on the Tarkasamgraha, p. 59 : 
 
 * To be the constant accompanier of what is to be esta- 
 
ANUMANA FOE OTHERS. 437 
 
 Wished (Sdhya-vyapakatva) consists in the not being the 
 counter-ertity (Apratiyogitva) of any absolute non-exist- 
 ence (Atyantabh&va) having the same subject of inhesion 
 (SamanadhikaraTia) as that which is to be established. 
 To be not the constant accompanier of the argument 
 (S&dhanvy&pakatva) consists in the being the counter- 
 entity (Pratiyogitva) of some absolute non-existence r not 
 impossibly] resident in that which possesses [the character 
 tendered as an] argument.' 
 
 The credit of this translation belongs not to me, but to 
 the late Dr. Ballantyne, who was assisted in unravelling 
 these cobwebs of Nyltya logic by the Ny&ya-Pandits of the 
 Sanskrit College at Benares. Such native aid would seem 
 to be almost indispensable for such an achievement. 
 
 \ 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 VAISESHIKA PHILOSOPHY. 
 Date of Sfrtras. 
 
 IT is fortunate that with regard to the Vaiseshika 
 philosophy, or rather with regard to the Vaiseshika-Sutras, 
 we are able to fix a date below which their composition 
 cannot be placed. In the year 1885 Professor Leumann, 
 well known by his valuable researches in Gaina literature, 
 published an article, * The old reports on the schisms of the 
 Gainas,' in the Indische Studien, XVII, pp. 91-135. Among 
 the various heresies there mentioned, the sixth, we are 
 told, p. 12J, was founded by the author of the Vaisesiya- 
 sutta of the Chaulu race, and hence called Chauluga *. If 
 there could be any doubt that this is meant for the Vaise- 
 shika-Sutras it would at once be dispersed by the 144 
 so-called points of that system, as mentioned by the author, 
 Ginabhadra. Ginabhadra's date is fixed by Professor Leu- 
 inann in the eighth century A.D., and is certainly not later. 
 This, it is true, is 110 great antiquity, still, if we consider 
 the age of our Samkhya-Sutras, referred now to the 
 thirteenth century A.D., even such a date, if only certain, 
 would be worth having. But we can make another step 
 backward. Haribhadra, originally a Brahman, but con- 
 verted to Gainism, has left us a work called the ShacZdar- 
 sanasarnuM'uya-sutrani, which conta : ns a short abstract of 
 the six Darsanas in which the Vai&eshika-darsana is de- 
 scribed as the sixth, and in that description likewise we 
 meet with the most important technical terms of the 
 VaiSushika. This short but important text was published 
 in the iirst volume of the Giornale della Societd Asiatica 
 
 * Could this be meant for Auluka ? 
 
DATES FROM TIBETAN SOURCES. 439 
 
 Italiana* 1887, and Sanskrit scholarship is greatly indebted 
 to Professor C. Puini for this and other valuable contribu- 
 tions of his to Craina literature. The author, Haribhadra, 
 died in 10.55 ^ ^ ne Vlra-era, i.e. 585 Samvat, that is 
 528 A.D. This would give us an attestation for the Vaise- 
 shika-Sutras as early as that of the Samkhya-karikas, 
 if not earlier, and it is curious to observe that in Hari- 
 bhadra's time the number six of the Darsanas was already 
 firmly established. For, after describing the (i) Bauddha, 
 (3) Naiyayika, (3) Samkhya, (4) (?aina, (5) Vaiseshika,' and 
 (6) (?aiminiya systems, he remarks, that if some consider 
 the Vaiseshika not altogether different from the Nyaya, 
 there would be only five orthodox systems (Astika), but 
 that in that case the number six could be completed by the 
 Lokayita (sic) system which he proceeds to describe, but 
 which, of course, is not an Astika, but a most decided 
 Nastika system of philosophy. It is curious to observe 
 that here again the Vedanta-philosophy, and the Yoga also, 
 are passed over in silence by the (?ainas, though, for reasons 
 explained before, we have no right to conclude from this 
 that these .systems had at that time not yet been reduced 
 to a systematic form like the other four Darsarias. What 
 we learn from this passage is that early in the sixth cen^ 
 tury A.D. the Nyya, Smkhya, Vaiseshika, and Purva- 
 Mim&y7is& systems of philosophy formed the subject of 
 scientific study among the (?ainas, and we may hope that 
 a further search for S'aina MSS. may bring us some new 
 discoveries, and some further light on the chronological 
 development of philosophical studies in India. 
 
 Dates from Tibetan Sources. 
 
 Whenever we shall know more of the sources from which 
 Tibetan writers derived their information about Indian 
 literary matters, more light may possibly come from thence 
 on the dates of the Indian philosophical systems of thought 
 also. It is true that the introduction of Buddhism into 
 Tibet dates from the eighth century only, but the trans- 
 lators of Sanskrit originals, such as $anti Rakshita, Padma 
 Sambhava, Dharmakirti, Dipamkara $ri<7//ana and others, 
 may have been in possession of much earlier information. 
 
440 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 In an account ' of King Kanishka (85106 A.D.) and his 
 Great Council under Vasumitra and Purnaka, we read that 
 there was at that time in Kashmir a Buddhist of the name 
 of Sutra who maintained a large Buddhist congregation 
 headed by a sage Dharmarakshita, and he is said to have 
 belonged to the Vaiseshika school 2 . This would prove the 
 existence of the Vaiseshika philosophy in the first century 
 A.D., a date so welcome that we must not allow ourselves 
 to accept it till we know what authority there was for the 
 Tibetan writers to adopt it. It is taken from Sumpahi 
 Choijung, and the same authority states that after the 
 death of Kanishka, a rich householder of the nainu of Jati 
 who lived at Asvaparanta in the north, invited Vasunetra, 
 a monk of the Vaiseshika school, from Maru in the west, 
 "and another, Gosha Samgha from Bactria, and supported 
 the native clergy, consisting of three hundred thousand 
 monks, for a period of ten years. 
 
 Xanada. 
 
 Although Nyaya and Vaiseshika have been often treated 
 as sister philosophies, we must, after having examined 
 Gotama's philosophy, give, for the sake of completeness, at 
 least a general outline of Ka^ada's system also. It does 
 not contain much that is peculiar to it, and seems to pre- 
 suppose much that we found already in the other systems. 
 Even the theory of Anus or atoms, generally cited as its 
 peculiar character, was evidently known to the Nyaya, 
 though it is more fully developed by the Vaiseshikas. It 
 begins with the usual promise of teaching something from 
 which springs elevation or the summum bonum, and that 
 something Kart&da calls Dharma or merit. From a par- 
 ticular kind of merit springs, according to Kanada, true 
 knowledge of certain Padarthas, or categories, and from 
 this oncfe more the summum bonum. These categories, of 
 which we spoke before as part of the Nyaya-philosophy, 
 embrace the whole realm of knowledge, and are: (i) sub-, 
 stance, Dravya; (2) quality, Gmia; (3) action, Karman; 
 (4) genus or community, Samanya, or what constitutes 
 
 1 Journal of Buddhist Text Society, voL I, p. i seq. 
 1 Ibid., vol. I. part 3, p. 19. 
 
QUALITIES. 441 
 
 a genus ; (5) species or particularity, Visesua, or what con- 
 stitutes an individual ; (6) inhesion or inseparability, Sama- 
 vaya ; (7) according to some, privation or negation, Abhava. 
 These are to be considered by means of their mutual 
 similarities and dissimilarities, that is, by showing how 
 they differ and how far they agree. Here we have, indeed, 
 what comes much nearer to Aristotle's categories than 
 Gotama's Padarthas. These categories or predicaments 
 were believed to contain an enumeration of 11 things 
 capable of being named, i. e. of being known. If the 
 number of Aristotle's categories was controverted, no wonder 
 that those of KaTiada should have met with the same fate. 
 It has always been a moot point whether Abhava, non- 
 existence, deserves a place among them, while some philo- 
 sophers were anxious to add two more, namely, akti, 
 potentia, and Sad-mya, similitude. 
 
 Snbvtanoev. 
 
 I. The substances, according A to the Vaiseshikas, are: 
 (i) earth, PHthivi; (2) water, ApaA; (3) light, Terras ; (4) 
 air, Vayu ; (5) ether, Akasa ; (6) time, Kala ; (7) space, Dis ; 
 (8) self, Atman ; (9) mind, Manas. These substances cannot 
 exist without qualities, as little as qualities can exist with- 
 out substances. The four at the head of the list are either 
 eternal or non-eternal, and exist either in the form of 
 atoms (Amis) or as material bodies. The non-eternal sub- 
 stances again exist as either inorganic, organic, or as organs 
 of sense. The impulse given to the atoms comes from God, 
 and in that restricted sense A the Vaiseshika has to be 
 accepted as theiatic. God is Atman in its highest form. 
 In its lower form it is the individual soul. The former is 
 one, and one only, the latter are innumerable. 
 
 Qualities. 
 
 II. The principal qualities of these substances are: 
 (i) colour Rupa, in earth, water, and light; (2) taste, Rasa, 
 in earth and water ; (3) smell, Gandha, in earth ; (4) touch, 
 Sparsa, in earth, water, light, and air ; (5) number, Sam- 
 khya, by which we perceive one or many; (6) extension 
 or quantity, Parim&wa; (7) individuality or severalty, 
 
44 2 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 P?^thaktva ; (b) ' conjunction, Samyoga , (9) disjunction, 
 Viyoga ; (10) priority, Earatva ; (i i) 1 posteriority ,Aparatva ; 
 (12) thought, Buddhi ; (13-14) pleasure and pain, Sukha 
 du&kha; (15-16) desire and aversion, IMAa-dveshau ; (i?) 1 
 will, effort, Prayatna. 
 
 Actions. 
 
 III. The principal actions affecting the substances are: 
 (i) throwing upwards, UtkshepaTia; (2) throwing do,wn- 
 . wards, Avakshepawa (or Apa); (3) contracting, Aku/S&ana; 
 (4) expanding, Utsarawa (or Pras-); (5) going, Gainana. 
 These actions or movements are sometimes identified with 
 or traced back to the Samskaras, a word difficult to 
 translate, and which has been rendered by dispositions and 
 instincts, as applied to either animate or inanimate bodies. 
 These Saraskaras 3 have an important position both in 
 the Samkhya- and in the Bauddha-philosophies. In the 
 Tarkadipika Samskara is rendered even by Crati (<?ati& 
 samskaratmika bhavati), i. e. nature or inborn peculiarity ; 
 and in the Tarkasamgraha it is represented as threefold 
 (VegaA, Bhavana, and SthitisthapakaA). 
 
 In the Sutras which follow, Kawada tries to point out 
 certain features which the 'three categories of substance, 
 quality, and action share in common, and others which are 
 peculiar to two, or to one only. In the course of thi3 discus- 
 sion he has frequently to dwell on the effects which they 
 produce, and he therefore proceeds in the next lesson to 
 examine the meaning of cause and effect, and likewise of 
 genus, species, and individuals. It may be that the name 
 of Vaisesliika was given to Ka^ada's philosophy from the 
 differences, or Viseshas, which he establishes between sub- 
 stances, qualities, and actions, or, it may be, from Visesha 
 as a name of individual things, applicable therefore to 
 atoms. But this, in the absence of decisive evidence, must 
 for the present remain undetermined. 
 
 1 Here follow in some lists as n to 15, gravity, fluidity, viscidity, and 
 sound. The remaining Gunas are said to be perceptible by the mental 
 organ only, not by the organs of sense. 
 
 * Here again some authorities add Dharma, virtue, and Adharma, vice, 
 Samskara, faculty or disposition, and Bhavana, imagination. 
 
 1 See Garbe, Sawkhya, p. 269 seq. 
 
QUALITIES EXAMINED. 443 
 
 Cause. 
 
 As to cause and effect, Ka?i&da remarks that cause pre- 
 cedes the effect, but that, in order to be a true cause, it 
 must be a constant antecedent, and the effect must be 
 unconditionally subsequent to it. There is an important 
 and often neglected difference between K&rana and KaraTia. 
 KSrana, though it may mean cause, is properly the instru- 
 mental cause only, or simply the instrument. An axe, for 
 instance, is the Kra7ia, or instrument, in felling a, tree, but 
 it is not the Kslrana, or cause. Causes, according to KaTi&da, 
 are threefold, intimate, non-intimate, and instrumental. 
 The threads, for instance, are the intimate cause of the 
 cloth, the sewing of the threads the non-intimate, and the 
 shuttle the instrumental cause. 
 
 Qualities Examined. 
 
 In the second book KaTiada examines the qualities of 
 earth, water, &c. He, like other philosophers, ascribes four 
 qualities to earth, three to water, two to light, one to air 
 (Akfoa). These are. the principal and characteristic quali- 
 ties, but others are mentioned afterwards, making alto- 
 gether fourteen for earth, such as colour, taste, smell, touch, 
 number, extension, individuality, conjunction, disjunction, 
 genus, species, gravity, fluidity, and permanence (II, i, 31). 
 Qualities ascribed to Isvara, or the Lord, are number, 
 knowledge, desire, and volition. In the case of air, which 
 is invisible, he uses touch as a proof of its existence, also 
 the rustling of leaves ; and he does this in order to show 
 that air is not one only. Curiously enough Kanada, after 
 explaining that there is no visible mark of air (II, J, 15) 
 but that its existence has to be proved by inference and by 
 revelation (II, i, 17), takes the opportunity of proving, as 
 it were, by the way. the existence of God (II, i, 18) by 
 saying that ' work arid word are the signs of the substantial 
 existence of beings different from ourselves/ This, at least, 
 is what the commentators read in this Sutra, and they 
 include under beings different from ourselves, not only God, 
 but inspired sages also. It seems difficult to understand 
 how such things as earth and the name of earth could be 
 claimed as the work of the sages, but, as far as God is 
 
444 INDIAN, PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 concerned, it seems certain that Kanada thinks he is able 
 to prove His existence, His omnipotence and omniscience 
 by two facts, that His name exists, and that His works 
 exist, perceptible to the senses. 
 
 Immediately afterwards, Kanada proceeds to prove the 
 existence of Akasa, ether, by showing that it must exist in 
 order to account for the existence of sound, which is a 
 quality, and as such requires the substratum of an eternal 
 and special substance, as shown before. The question of 
 sound is treated again more fully II, 2, 21-37. 
 
 A distinction is made afterwards between characteristic 
 and adventitious qualities. If a garment, for instance, is 
 perfumed by a flower, the smell is only an adventitious 
 quality of the garment, while it is characteristic in the 
 case of earth. Thus heat is characteristic of light, cold of 
 water, &e 
 
 Time. 
 
 Time, which was one of the eternal substances, is declared 
 to manifest its existence by such marks as priority, posteri- 
 ority, simultaneity, slowness, and quickness. The argu- 
 ments in support of the substantiality of air and ether 
 apply to time also, which is one, while its division into past, 
 present, and future, hibernal, vernal, and autumnal, is due 
 to extrinsic circumstances, such as the sun's revolutions. 
 Time itself is one, eternal, and infinite. 
 
 Space. 
 
 Space, again, is proved by our perceiving that one thing 
 is remote fronj or near to another. Its oneness is proved 
 as in the case of time ; and its apparent diversity, such as 
 east, south, west, and north, depends likewise on extrinsic 
 circumstances only, such as the rising and setting of the 
 sun. Like time it is one, eternal, ana infinite. 
 
 So far Kanada has been chiefly occupied with external 
 substances, their qualities and activities, and he now pro- 
 ceeds, according to the prescribed order, to consider the 
 eighth substance, viz. Atman, the Self, the first in the list 
 of his sixteen Padarthas. Like Gotama, Kanada also argues 
 that the Atman must be different from the senses because 
 
AMIS OR ATOMS. 445 
 
 whilo the senses,, apprehend each its own object only 
 (i) the sense of hearing, sound ; (a) the sense of smelling, 
 odour; (3) the sense of tasting, savour; (4) the sense of 
 seeing, colour; (5) the sense of feeling, touch; it follows 
 that there must be something else to apprehend them all, 
 the work which in other philosophies was ascribed to 
 Manas, at least in the first instance. Besides, the organs 
 of sense are btit instruments, and as such unconscious, c*ri3 
 they .require an agent who employs them. If we see a 
 number of chariots skilfully driven, we know there must 
 .be a charioteer, and we know also that chariots and horses 
 are different from the charioteer. The same applies to the 
 senses of the body and to the Self, and shows that the 
 senses by themselves could not perform the work that 
 results in cognition. In defending this argument against 
 all possible objections, KaTiada, following the example of 
 Gotama, is drawn away into a discussion of what is a 
 valid and what is an invalid argument, and more par- 
 ticularly into an examination of what is a Vy&pti, or an 
 invariable concomitance, fit to serve as a true foundation 
 for a syllogism. 
 
 Manas. 
 
 But he soon leaves this subject, and, without finishing it, 
 proceeds to a consideration of Manas, the ninth and last of 
 the f)ravyas or substances. This, too, is to him much the 
 same that it was to Gotama, who treats it as the sixth of 
 the Prameyas. In this place, as we saw, Manas might be 
 translated by attention rather than by mind. 
 
 Anus or Atoms. 
 
 What is thought to be peculiar to Ka?i&da, nay the dis- 
 tinguishing feature of his philosophy, is the theory of Anus 
 or atoms. They take the place of the Tanmatras in the 
 Samkhya-philosophy. Though the idea of an atom is not 
 unknown in the Nyllya-philosophy (Ny&ya-Sfttras IV, 2, 
 4-25), it is nowhere so fully worked out as in the Vaise- 
 shika. Kanada argued that there must be somewhere a 
 smallest thing, that excludes further analysis. Without 
 this admission, we should have a regressus ad infinitum, 
 a most objectionable process in the eyes of all Indian philo- 
 
446 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 sophers. A mountain, he says, would not be larger than 
 a mustard seed. These smallest and invisible particles are 
 held by KaTiMa to be eternal in themselves, but uon-eternal 
 as aggregates. As aggregates again they may be organised, 
 organs, and inorganic. Thus the human body is earth 
 organised, the power of smelling is *he earthly organ, 
 stones are inorganic. 
 
 Ii is, no doubt, very tempting to ascribe & Greek origin 
 to Kawada's theory of atoms. But suppose that the atomic 
 theory had really been borrowed from a Greek source, 
 would it not be strange that Kan&da's atoms are supposed 
 never to assume visible dimensions trll there is a combina- 
 tion of three double atoms (TryaTiuka), neither the simple 
 nor the double atoms being supposed to be visible by 
 themselves. I do not remember anything like this in 
 Epicurean authors, and it seems to me to give quite an 
 independent character to Kanada's view of the nature of 
 an atom. 
 
 We are told that water, in its atomic state, is eternal, as 
 an aggregate transient. Beings in the realm of Varuna 
 (god of the sea) are organised, taste is the watery organ, 
 rivers are water inorganic. 
 
 Light in its atomic state is eternal, as an aggregate 
 transient. There are organic luminous bodies in the sun, 
 sight or the visual ray is the luminous organ, burning fires 
 are inorganic. 
 
 Air, again, is both atomic and an aggregate. Beings of 
 the air, spirits, &c., are- organised air ; touch in the skin 
 is the aerial organ, wind is inorganic air. Here it would 
 seem as if we had something not very unlike the doctrine 
 of Empedocles, Fair/ pen yap yaiav dircoTra/xez;, vbari 8' vbu>p 
 AlOepi b y aiOcpa blov] arap irvpl irvp diSrjAor. But though we 
 may discover the same thought in the philosophies of 
 Kaw&da and Empedocles, the form which it takes in Tmlia 
 is characteristically different from its Greek form. 
 
 Ether is always eternal and infinite. The sense of hear- 
 ing is the ethereal organ : nay, it is supposed by some that 
 ether is actually contained in the ear. 
 
 As to atoms, they are supposed to form first an aggregate 
 of two, then an aggregate of three double atoms, then of 
 
SAMAVAYA. 447 
 
 four triple atoms, and so on. While single jitoms are inde- 
 structible, composite atoms are by their very nature liable 
 to decomposition, and, in that sense, to destruction. An 
 atom, by itself invisible, is compared- to the sixth part of 
 a mote in a sunbeam. 
 
 S&m&nya. 
 
 IV. As to Samanya, community, or, as we should say, 
 genus, the fourth of Kanada's categories, it is supposed to 
 be eternal, and a property common to several, and abiding 
 in substance, in quality, and in action. It is distinguished 
 by degrees, as fiigh and low ; the highest Sm&nya, or, as 
 we should say, the highest genus (Crati) is Satta,- mere 
 being, afterwards differentiated by Upadhis, or limitations, 
 and developed into ever so many subordinate species. The 
 Buddhist .philosophers naturally deny the existence of such 
 a category, and maintain that all OUT experience has to do 
 with single objects only. 
 
 V. These single objects are what KaTi&da comprehends 
 under his fifth category of Visesha, or that whiclr consti- 
 tutes the individuality or separateness of any object. This 
 also is supposed to abide in eternal substances, so that it 
 seems to have been conceived not as a mere abstraction, 
 but as something real, that was there and could be dis- 
 covered by means of analysis or abstraction. 
 
 Saxnavaya. 
 
 VI. The last category, with which we have met several 
 times before, is one peculiar to Indian philosophy. Sarna- 
 vaya is translated by inhesion or inseparability. With 
 Ka7i4da also it is different from mere connection, Samyoga, 
 such *,s obtains between horse and rider, or between milk 
 and water mixed together. There is Samavaya between 
 threads and cloth, between father and son, between two 
 halves a.nd a whole, between cause and effect, between sub- 
 stances and qualities, the two being interdependent and 
 therefore inseparable. 
 
 Though this relationship is known in non-Indian philo- 
 sophies, it has not received a name of its own, though 
 
448 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 . 
 
 such a term iright have proved very useful in several 
 controversies. The relation between thought and word, 
 for instance, is not Samyoga, but Samav&y, insepar- 
 ableness. 
 
 Abi&va. 
 
 VII. In addition to these" six categories, some logicians 
 required a negative category also, that of Abhava or 
 absence. And this also they divided into different kinds, 
 into (i) Prgabh&va, former not-being, applying ID the 
 cloth before It was woven; (2) Dhvamsa, subsequent non- 
 being, as when a jar, being smashed, exists no longer as 
 ajar; and (3) Atyant&bMva, absolute not-being, an impos- 
 sibility, such as the son of a barren woman ; (4) Anyonya- 
 bh&va, reciprocal negation, or mutual difference, such as we 
 see in the case of water and ice. 
 
 It may seem as if the Vaiseshika was rather a disjointed 
 and imperfect system. And to a certain extent it is so. 
 Though it presupposes a knowledge of the Nyaya-system, 
 it frequently goes over the same ground as the Ny&ya, 
 though it does not quote verbatim from it. We should 
 hardly Imagine that the Vaiseshika-Sfttras would argue 
 against Upamana, or comparison, as a separate Pram&?ia, 
 in addition to Pratyaksha (sense) and Anum&na (inference), 
 unless in some other school it had been treated as an inde- 
 pendent means of knowledge ; and this school wag, as we 
 saw, the Nyaya, which is so far shown to be anterior to 
 the Vaiseshika-philosophy. Kan&da denies by no means 
 that comparison is a channel through which knowledge 
 may reach us, he only holds that it is not an independent 
 channel, but must be taken as a subdivision of another and 
 larger channel, viz. Anum&na or inference. He probably 
 held the same opinion about Sabda, whether we take it in 
 the sense of the Veda or of an utterance of a recognised 
 authority, because the recognition of such an authority 
 always implies, as he rightly holds, a previous inference to 
 support it. He differs in this respect from the ATarvaka 
 secularist, who denies the authority of the Veda outright, 
 while Ka?ida appeals to it in several places. 
 
 A similar case meets us in Gotaina's Nyaya-Sfttras (1, 16). 
 Here, apparently without any definite reason. Gotama tells 
 
THE SIX SYSTEMS. 449 
 
 us iii a separate aphorism that Buddhl (understanding), 
 Upalabdhi (apprehension), and (?/?ana (knowing) are not 
 different in meaning. Why should he say so, unless he had 
 wanted to enter his protest against 6me one else who had 
 taught that they meant different things ? Now this some 
 one else could only have been Kapila, who holds, as we 
 saw, that Buddhi is a development of Prakriti or unintel- 
 ligent natiire, and that conscious apprehension (Sam vid) 
 originates with the Purusha only. But here again, though 
 Gotama seems to have had the tenets of the S&mkhya- 
 school in his eye, we have no right on this ground to say 
 that our Sarakhya-Sftoras existed before the Nyya-Sutras 
 were composed. All we are justified in saying is that, like 
 all the other systems of Indian philosophy, these two also 
 emerged from a common stratum in which such opinions 
 occupied the minds of various thinkers long before the 
 final outcome settled down, and was labelled by such names 
 as Sslmkhya, or Nyaya, Kapila, or Gotama, and long, of 
 course, before the Samkhya-Sutras, which we now possess, 
 were constructed. 
 
 Tfce Six Systems. 
 
 It must have been observed how these six, or, if we 
 include the B&rhaspatya, these seven systems of philosophy, 
 though they differ from each other and criticise each other, 
 share nevertheless so many things in common that we can 
 only understand them as products of one and the same soil, 
 though cultivated by different hands. They all promise to 
 teach the nature of the soul, and its relation to the God- 
 head or to a Supreme Being. They all undertake to supply 
 the means of knowing the nature of that Supreme Being, 
 and through that knowledge to pave the way to supreme 
 happiness. They all share the conviction that there is 
 suffering in the world ,vhich is something irregular, has no 
 right to exist, and should therefore be removed. Though 
 there is a strong religious vein running through the six 
 so-called orthodox systems, they belong to a phase of 
 thought in which not only has the belief in the many Vedic 
 gods long been superse3ed by a belief in a Supreme Deity, 
 such as Pragdpati, but this phase also has been left behind 
 
 29 Qs 
 
45O INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 to make room or* a faith in a Supreme Power, or ir the 
 Godhead which has no name but Brahman or Sat, * I arn 
 what I am/ The Hindus themselves make indeed a dis- 
 tinction between the six orthodox systems. They have no 
 word for orthodox ; nay, we saw that some of these 
 systems, though atneistic, were nevertheless treated as per- 
 missible doctrines, because they acknowledged the authority 
 of che Veda. Orthodox might therefore bfc replaced by 
 Vedic ; and if atheism seems to us incompatible with 
 Vedism or Vedic orthodoxy, we must remember that athe- 
 ism with Indian philosophers means something very dif- 
 ferent from 4 what it means with us. It means a denial of 
 an active, busy, personal <pr humanised god only, who is 
 called tsvara, the Lord, feut behind him and above him 
 Hindu philosophers recognised a Higher Power, whether 
 they called it Brahman, or Paramatman, or Purusha. It 
 was the denial of that reality which constituted a Nastika, 
 a real heretic, one who could say of this invisible, yet 
 omnipresent Being, Na asti, ' He is not/ Buddha therefore, 
 as wel; as Br/haspati, the Jfarvaka, was a Nastika, while 
 both the Yoga and the Samkhya, the former Sesvara, with 
 an Isvara, the other Anisvara, without an Isvara, the one 
 theistic, the other atheistic, could be recognised as orthodox 
 or Vedic. 
 
 The Hindus themselves were fully aware that some of 
 their systems of philosophy differed from each other on 
 essential points, and that some stood higher than others. 
 Maclhusudana clearly looked upon the Vedanta as the best 
 of N all philosophies, and so did 6'amkara, provided he was 
 allowed to interpret the Sutras of Badarayawa according 
 to the principles of his own unyielding Monism. Madhu- 
 sudana, as we saw, treated the Samkhya and Yoga by 
 themselves as different from the two Mimamsas, Nyaya 
 and Vai^eshika, and as belonging tc Smriti rather than to 
 >S'ruti Vif/wana-Bhikshu, a philosopher of considerable 
 grasp, while fully recognising the difference between the 
 six systems of philosophy, tried to discover a common truth 
 behind them all, and to point out how they can be studied 
 together, or rather in succession, and how all of them are 
 meant to lead honest students into the way of truth. 
 
THE SIX SYSTEMS. 451 
 
 In his Preface to the Samkhya-Sutras, so well edited 
 and translated by Professor Garbe, Vigrwana-Bhikshu says : 
 " If we read in the BrihadaraTiyaka Upanishad II, 4, 5, and 
 IV, 5, 6, that the Self must be seen, must be heard, must 
 be pondered and meditated on, hearing and the rest are 
 evidently pointed out as means of a direct vision of the 
 Self, by which the highest object of man can be realised. 
 If it is asked how these three things can be achieved, 
 SmHti or tradition answers : ' It must be heard from the 
 words of the Veda, it must be pondered on with proper 
 arguments, and, after that, it must be meditated on con- 
 tinuously. These are the means of the vision of the Self/ 
 
 ' Meditated on/ that is, by means proposed in Yoga- 
 philosophy. Three things are known from passages of the 
 Veda, (i) the highest object of man, (acknowledge essential 
 for its attainment, (3) the nature of the Atman or Self which 
 forms the object of such knowledge. And it was the pur- 
 pose of the Exalted, as manifested in the form of Kapila, 
 to teach, in his six-chaptered manual on Viveka or distinc- 
 tion between Purusha and Prakriti, all the arguments which 
 are supported by $ruti. 
 
 If then it should be objected that we have already a 
 logical treatment of these subjects in the Nyaya and 
 Vaiseshika systems, rendering the Samkhya superfluous, 
 and that it is hardly possible that both the Samkhya as 
 well as the Nyaya and Vaiseshika could be means of right 
 knowledge, considering that each represents the Self in a 
 different form, the Nyaya and Vaiseshika as with qualities, 
 the Samkhya as without, thus clearly contradicting each 
 other, we answer No, by no means! Neither is the Sam- 
 khya rendered superfluous by the Nyaya and Vaicseshika, 
 nor do they contradict each other. They differ from each 
 other so far only as Nyaya and Vaiseshika treat of the 
 objects of empirical knowledge, but the Samkhya of the 
 highest truth. The Nyaya and Vaiseshika, as they follow 
 the common-sense view that it is the Self that feels joy 
 and pain, aim at no more t han at the first steps in know- 
 ledge, namely at the recognition of the Atman as different 
 from the body, because it is impossible to enter per saltum 
 into the most abstruse wisdom. The knowledge of those 
 
 C a- 2 
 
452 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 preliminary schools which is attained by oimply removing 
 the idea that the Self is the body is no more than an 
 empirical comprehension -of facts, in the same manner as by 
 a removal of the misapprehension in taking a man at 
 a distance for a post, there follows the apprehension that 
 he has hands, feet, &c., that is, a knowledge of the truth, 
 yet. purely empirical. If therefore we read .the following 
 verse from the Bhagavad-gita III, 29 : 
 
 'Those who are deceived by the constituent GuTias of 
 Prakriti, cling to the workings of the Gu?ias (Sattva, 
 Ra</as, and Tamas). Let therefore those who know the 
 whole truth take care not to distract men of moderate 
 understanding who do not as yet know the whole truth ; ' 
 we see that here the followers of the Nyaya and Vaise- 
 shika systems, though they hold to the false belief that the 
 Self can be an agent, are not treated as totally in error, 
 but only as not knowing the whole truth, if compared with 
 the Samkhyas, who know the whole truth. Even such 
 knowledge as they possess, leads step by step by means 
 of the lower impassiveness (Apara-vairagya) to liberation ; 
 while the knowledge of the Samkhyas only, as compared 
 with the lower knowledge, is absolute knowledge, and 
 leads by means of higher impassiveness (Paravairagya) 
 straight to liberation. For it follows from the words 
 quoted from the Bhagavad-gita that he only who" knows 
 that the Self is never an agent, can arrive at the whole 
 truth, and from hundreds of true Vedic texts, such as B? v ih. 
 Ar. Up. IV, 3, 22 : ' Then he has overcome all the sorrows 
 of the heart'; thinking that desires, &c., belong to the 
 internal organ (Manas) only ; or Brih. Ar. Up. IV, 3, 7 : 
 ' He, remaining the same (the Self), wanders through both 
 worlds, as^ if thinking, and as if moving (but not really) ' : 
 or Erik Ar. Up. IV, 3, 16: 'And whatever he may have 
 seen there he is not followed (affected) by it ' ; and likewise 
 from hundreds of similar passages in the Snm'ti, such as 
 Bhag. Ill, 27 : ' All works are performed by the constituents 
 of matter (the Guw/as of Prakriti) ; he only who is deceived 
 by Ahamkara or subjectivation imagines that he is the 
 agent'; and such as V. P. VI, 7, 22: 'The Self consists of 
 bliss (Nirvana/, and knowledge only, and is not con- 
 
THE SIX SYSTEMS. 453 
 
 baminated (by the .Grmas). The qualities (Gu?? as) are full 
 of suffering, not of knowledge, and they belong to Prakriti, 
 not to the Self ' from all such passages we say that it is 
 clear that the knowledge proclaimed by Nyaya and Vaise- 
 shika with regard to the highest subject is overcome. 
 
 By this, however, we do not mean to say that Nyaya 
 and Yaiseshika are not means of right knowledge, for iheir 
 teaching is not superseded by the Samkhya so far as 
 regards that portion which treats of the difference between 
 Self and the material body. Here we must follow the 
 principle (laid dowr in the Purva-Mimamsa), that what 
 a word (chiefly) r a ims at, that is its meaning ; (and apply it 
 to the systems of philosophy). The Nyaya simply repeats 
 the popular idea that joy pertains to the Self, without 
 referring to any further proofs ; and this chapter therefore 
 is not to be considered as really essential (or as what the 
 Nyaya chiefly aims at). 
 
 But admitting that there is here no difference between 
 Nyaya-Vaiseshika and the Samkhya systems, is there not 
 a clear contradiction between the Samkhya on one side 
 and the Brahma-Mimamsa (Vedanta) and the Yoga on the 
 other? The former denies the existence of an eternal 
 Isvara, the two others maintain it. Surely it cannot be 
 said that here also the contradiction between these systems, 
 the atheistic and theistic, can be removed by simply ad- 
 mitting, as before, two points of view, the metaphysical and 
 the empirical, as if the theistic doctrine existed only for the 
 sake of the worship of the multitude. Such a decision 
 would here be impossible. The atheistic view that an Isvara 
 is difficult to know and therefore non-existent, may well 
 have been merely repeated by the Samkhyas, as a popular 
 idea, and in order to put an end to the desire of men for 
 acquiring a divine status and divine Lbnours (by means of 
 penance, &c.), as in the case of the Nai}'ayikas when they 
 say that the Self possesses qualities (which must be taken 
 as merely a provisional remark). In the Veda or elsewhere 
 lsvara,the anthropomorphic deity, is never explicitly denied, 
 so that one could say that theism should be taken as the 
 common popular view only. 
 
 In spite of "all this we hold that here uoo these different 
 
454 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 views are really due to empirical or to metaphysical con- 
 ceptions. 
 
 For as works like the Bhagavad-gita (XVI, 8) when 
 saying : 
 
 'Those say that the world is unreal, without support, 
 
 without an tsvara/ 
 
 condemn the atheistic doctrine, we may very well suppose 
 that the Samkhyas simply repeated a common popular 
 view that there is no Isvara, in order to discourage the 
 striving after a divine status (so common among Saints), 
 or for some similar purpose. They v^ould naturally think 
 that if they, so far following the -materialists, did not deny 
 the existence of an active tsvara, the acquisition of the 
 discriminating knowledge (of the Samkhyas, between 
 Prakriti and Purusha) would be impeded, because those 
 who believe in an infinite, eternal and perfect Isvara, have 
 their thoughts entirely absorbed by this tsvara (so* that 
 they might not attend to the essential doctrine of the 
 S&mkhyas). No attack is made anywhere on theism, so 
 that the theistic doctrine of the Ved&nta should be restricted 
 to sacrificial and similar purposes only. But from passages 
 like Mah&bh. XII, 1167: 'No knowledge is equal to that 
 of the S&mkhya, no power to that of the Yoga/ and again 
 XII, 11198 : 'Let there be no doubt, the knowledge of the 
 S&mkhya is considered the highest/ we should learn the 
 excellence of the Smkhya knowledge as superior to other 
 systems, though .only with regard to that portion which 
 treats of the distinction of Self and Prakriti, and not with 
 regard to the portion that objects to an Isvara. Furthermore 
 from the consensus of Par&sara also and all other eminent 
 authorities, we see that theism alone is absolutely true. 
 And from Parasara's Upa-puraTia and similar works the, 
 truth of the Brahma-MimAmsa in its chapter on the Isvara 
 is perfectly manifest. There we read : 
 
 ' In the systems of Akshapada and KaTiada (Nyaya and 
 Vaiseshika), in the S&mkhya and in the Yoga, whatever 
 portion is in conflict with the Veda, that has to be rejected 
 by all to whom the Veda is the only law/ 
 
 ' In the systems of Crainrini and Vyasa (in the Pftrva and 
 Uttara-Mlm&ras&) there is nothing in conflict with the 
 
THE SIX SYSTEMS. 455 
 
 Vedk; for these trvo in their knowledge of the meaning of the 
 Veda have, by means of the Veda fully mastered the Veda/ 
 From other passages also the superior authority of the 
 Brahma-Mim&msa may be gathered, at least with regard 
 to that portion which treats of fsvara. Thus we read in 
 Mahabh. XII, 7663 seq. : 
 
 ' Manifold philosophical doctrines have been propounded 
 by various teachers; but cling to that only which has been 
 settled by arguments, by the Veda, and by the practice of 
 good people/ 
 
 From this passage of the Moksnadharma also (XII, 7663), 
 and on account of the practice of Parasara and all eminent 
 authorities, it follows that the proof of the existence of an 
 tsvara, as proclaimed by the Brahma-Mimosa, the Nyaya, 
 Vaiseshika and other systems, is to be accepted as the 
 strongest ; and likewise because by passages in the Kurma 
 and other Pura/fias the ignorance of the Samkhyas with 
 regard to an Isvara has been clearly pronounced by Nara- 
 ya?ia and others; e.g. 'Take thy refuge with the begin- 
 nir^less and endless Brahman, whom the Samkhyas, though 
 strong as Yogins, are unable to perceive/ 
 
 Besides, that tsvara alone is the principal object of the 
 Brahma-Mimamsa is proved by the very first words and 
 by other indications. If then it had been refuted on 
 that principal ,point, the whole philosophy (the Brahma- 
 Mimamsa) would no longer be a means at* right knowledge, 
 according to the principle, mentioned before, that what 
 a word chiefly aims at, that is its meaning. The chief aim 
 of the Samkiiya, on the contrary, is not the denial of an 
 L'vara, but the highest object to be obtained by the Self 
 by means of the discrimination between body and Self 
 which Jeads to it. Hence, though it be superseded in that 
 part which treats of the denial of tke tsvara, it will remain 
 as a means of right Knowledge, and this once more accord- 
 ing to the principle that what a word chietiy aims at, that 
 is its purport. The Samkhya has therefore its ^proper 
 sphere, and is vulnerable in that part only which treats of 
 the denial of the Isvara, the personal and active god. 
 
 Nor would it be right to say that in the Brahma-Mima wsa 
 isvara may indeed be the principal object, but not its 
 
456 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY 
 
 eternal lordship or godhead. For, as the objection raided 
 in the Purvapaksha as to its (the Mim&ms&'s) allowing no 
 weight to the other Smritis cannot be sustained, it is cleaK 
 that tsvara can only be the object of the Brahma-Mim&ms&, 
 provided he is characterised by eternal lordship. 
 
 If it is said that the first Sutra of the Brahma-Mimamsa 
 does not say 'Now then a wish to know the highest 
 Brahman/ and that therefore it does not by the word 
 Brahman mean the Parabrahman, we must not on account 
 of the Smkhya denial of an Isvara suppose that the 
 Vednta and Yoga systems likewise refer only to an evolved 
 Isvara (a Karyesvara, a product of Prakriti), for in that 
 case tha whole string of Sutras from II, 2, i, directed against 
 the S&mkhya and showing that mindless matter, being 
 incapable of creating, cannot be established by mere reason- 
 ing, would be absurd ; for if the God of the Vedanta were 
 a made God, or a product of matter, the Samkhyas v/ould 
 have been right in teaching an independent matter (Pra- 
 kriti). Lastly, the eternal character of Isvara is quite 
 clear from such Yoga-Sutras as I, 26, ' He (God) is the Guru 
 even of the oldest sages, because he is not limited by time/ 
 and likewise from Vyasa's commentary on that Sutra. It is 
 clear therefore that as the SUmkhya means to deny the 
 common popular anthropomorphic view of Isvara only, 
 whether as a concession, or as a bold assertion, or, for some 
 other reason, there exists no real contradiction between it, 
 and the Brahma-Mim&ms&, and the Yoga. 
 
 Such concessions are found in other authoritative works 
 also, as, for instance, in the Vishmi-PuraTia, I, 17, 83 : 
 
 'O Daitya, these various opinions have I declared for 
 those who admit a difference (who are not yet monists), by 
 making a concession (to dualism). Let this abstract of 
 mine be listened to/ 
 
 Nay it is possible that in some accredited systems also 
 opinions should have been put forward in contradiction 
 with the Veda in order to shut out bad men from a know- 
 ledge of the truth. Such parts would of course not be 
 means of right knowledge, but the other and principal 
 parts only, which are in harmony with Sruti and Snmti. 
 Hence we see that in the Padma-Pura7?,a fault is found with 
 
THE SIX SYSTEMS. 457 
 
 all systems except the Brahma-Mimamsa and Yoga. Here 
 we see God (/Siva) saying to Parvati : 
 
 ' Listen, O goddess, I shall in succession tell you the 
 heretical theories by the mere hearing of which even sages 
 lose their knowledge. 
 
 First of all, I myself have taught the Saiva, Pasupata 
 and other systems, and afterwards others have been pro- 
 mulgated by Brahmans, who were filled by my powers. 
 Ka7tada has promulgated the great Vaiseshika doctrine, 
 Gautama the Ny&ya, Kapila the Samkhya. The Brahman 
 (?aimini has composed a very large work of atheistic 
 character, the first of the two Mimamsas, which treat of 
 the meaning of the Veda. Then, in order to destroy the 
 demons, DhishaTia (Brihaspati) propounded the altogether 
 despicable #&rvka system ; and Vish/mi, under the disguise 
 of Buddha, propounded the erroneous Baucldha system 
 whieh teaches that people are to go naked, and should wear 
 blue or other coloured garments, while I myself, goddess, 
 under the disguise of a Brahman (i.e. of Samkara) have 
 ta"ght in this Kali age the doctrine of illusion (Maya) 
 which is false and only a disguised Buddhism. It is spread 
 far and wide in the world, and attributes a false meaning 
 to the words of the Veda. In it it is said that all works 
 should be relinquished, and after surrendering all works, 
 complete inactivity is recommended. 
 
 I have taught in it the identity of the highest Self and 
 the individual Self, and have represented the highest form 
 of Brahman as entirely free from qualities; and this in 
 order to destroy the whole world in this Kali age. This 
 extensive, non-Vedic, deceptive doctrine has been pro- 
 pounded by me, as if it presented the true meaning of the 
 Veda, in order that all living things might perish/ 
 
 All this and more has been explained by me in the com- 
 mentary on the Brahma-Mimamsa, and it is wrong there- 
 fore to say of any of the admittedly orthodox systems of 
 philosophy that it is not the means of right knowledge or 
 that it- is refuted by others. For in reality none of them 
 is contradicted or refuted in what constitutes its own chief 
 object. 
 
 But, if it be asked whetner the Samkhya-philosophy 
 
458 INBIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 has not likewise made a mere concession with regard to 
 the multiplicity of souls, we answer decidedly, No. For 
 on that point there is really no contradiction (between 
 the two, S&rakhya and Vednta) because it is shown in 
 the chapter which begins at Brahma-Sfttras II, 3, 43, and 
 declares that the individual self is a part of the Highest 
 Self, because the multiplicity is stated (in the Veda) ; that 
 the Brahma-Mim&ms& also recognises a multiplicity of 
 Atman, But that the individual souls, as conceived by the 
 S&mkhya, are Atman is certainly denied by the Ved&nta, 
 for it follows from Sutra IV, 1,3: ' Jhey know him and 
 teach him as Atman,' that to the Ved&ntins, from the 
 standpoint of absolute truth, the highest soul only is 
 Atman. Nevertheless the Samkhya does not thereby lose 
 its authoritative character, because it is not superseded 
 by the Ved&nta in what constitutes its own characteristic 
 doctrine, namely that for the individual soul, the know- 
 ledge of its being different from everything else, constitutes 
 the true means of liberation. There is no contradiction 
 therefore, because the concepts of the manifold Atman ^nd 
 of the one Atman, so well known from Veda and tradition, 
 can be fully reconciled according as we take an empirical 
 or metaphysical view, as has been explained by ourselves 
 in the Commentary on the Brahma-Mim&ms& Sapienti 
 sat" 
 
 I have given here this long extract from Vigrwana- 
 Bhikshu, though I have to confess that in several places 
 the thread of the argument is difficult to follow, even after 
 the care bestowed on disentangling it by Professor Garbe. 
 Still, even as it is, it will be useful, I hope, as a good 
 specimen of the Indian way of carrying on a philosophical 
 controversy. Nay, in spite of all that has been said against 
 Vigrtfana-Bhikshu, I cannot deny that to a certain extent 
 he seems to me right in discerning a kind of unity behind 
 the variety of the various philosophical systems, each being 
 regarded as a step towards the highest and final truth. 
 He certainly helps us to understand how it came 'to pass 
 that the followers of systems which to our mind seem 
 directly opposed to each other on very important points, 
 managed to keep peace with each other and with the Veda, 
 
THE SIX SYSTEMS. 459 
 
 .the highest authority in all matters religious, philosophical 
 and moral. The idea that the largely accepted interpre- 
 tation of the Vedanta-Sfttras by /Sa^kara was a perversion 
 of the Veda and of Badarayana's Sfttras, not much better 
 than Buddhism, nay that Buddhism was the work of 
 Vishmt, intended for the destruction of unbelievers, is very 
 extraordinary, and evidently of late origin. Nay, nothing 
 seems to me to show better that these Puranas, in the form 
 in* which we possess them, are of recent origin, and certainly 
 not the outcome of a period previous to the Renaissance of 
 Sanskrit literature, tjian passages like those quoted by Vi#- 
 /7ana-Bhikshu, representing the gods of the modern Hindu 
 pantheon as interfering with the ancient philosophy of 
 India, and propounding views which they know to be erro- 
 neous with the intention of deceiving mankind. Whatever 
 the age of our philosophical Sutras may be, and some of 
 them, in the form in which we possess them, are certainly 
 more modern than our Pur&Tias, yet the tradition or Param- 
 par& which they represent must be much older; and in 
 trj ing to enter into the spirit of the Six Systems, we must 
 implicitly trust to their guidance, without allowing our- 
 selves to be disturbed by the fancies of later sects. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 ABDAYASES, nephew of K. Gon- 
 d.*phores, found on Indo-Par- 
 A thian coins, 63. 
 Abhassara, spirits, 17. 
 Abhava, 377, 448- 
 
 not-being, -203, 395. 
 Abhibuddhis, the five, 1165. 
 Abhyasa, 338. 
 
 Absorption, no part of the Yoga 
 
 system, 310. 
 Actions, Karman, 443. 
 Adhibhautika, pain from other 
 A living beings, 275, 367. 
 Adhidaivika, pain from divine 
 
 agents, 275, 367. 
 Adhikara-vidhis, 200. 
 Adi yatma, Adhibhuta, and Adhi- 
 
 daivata, 264. 
 Adhyatmika, pain from the body, 
 
 274, 367- 
 
 Adhyavasaya, determination, 173. 
 Adi-purusha, the First Self, 329. 
 
 a firirt Purusha, 331. 
 
 Aditi, identified with sky and air, 
 ^ the gods, &c., 40. 
 Adityas, seven in number, 38. 
 
 later raised to twelve, 39. 
 Adrishta, or Apurva, 277. 
 Agra, doubtful meaning of, 78. 
 Agama. A Used by Pata%ali instead 
 
 of Aptava/cana, 337. 
 Ayatasatru and Balaki, 13, 27. 
 
 K. of Kasi, son of Vaidehl, 
 
 J 3> 23. 
 
 Aghora, not terrible, 35: 
 Agrita Kesakambali, teaeher men- 
 A tioned in Buddhist annals, 89. 
 Agivaka, Gosali originally an, 89. 
 Agrivakos. 240. 
 
 Agfianavada, Agnosticism, 19. 
 Agni as Indra and Savitri, 40. 
 Ahamkara, subjectivation, 249, 250, 
 
 283. 
 
 Ahawktlra, a cosmic power, a&. 
 
 modifications of the, 250. 
 
 mental act, 250. 
 
 of three kinds, 264. 
 
 the cause of creation, 283. 
 
 personal feelings, 426. 
 Aisvaryas, or superhuman powers, 
 
 226. 
 
 Aitihya, tradition, 395, 429. 
 Akasa, fifth element, vehicle of 
 
 sound, 383, 386, 400, 443. 
 Akhyayikas, or stories, 225, 243. 
 
 absent in the Tattva-samasa and 
 
 the Karikas, 243. 
 
 reappear in the Samkhya-Sutras, 
 
 243- 
 
 Afcit, matter, 187. 
 Akn'tis, species, 252, 398. 
 Aksha, organ, 252. 
 Akshapada and Kanada, 454. 
 Alara Kahuna, 20. 
 Alberuni, 222. 
 Alexander and Indian philosophy, 
 
 386. 
 Alexandria, known as Alasando, 
 
 saec. Ill, 63. 
 
 Brahmans did not borrow ideas 
 
 from, 150. 
 
 did Brahmans come to ? 399. 
 
 Logos-idea, no antecedents of it 
 
 in Greek philosophy, 56. 
 Alimga, i. e. Prakn'ti, 341 n. 
 American Indians, their sweating 
 
 processes, 312. 
 Amu^a, not stupid,, 251. 
 Ananda, or bliss in the highest 
 
 Brahman, 372. 
 Anarabhyadhita. 201. 
 AnathapincZika, 25. 
 Aniruddha, 188. 
 
 Ann'ta, unreal written letters, 92, 
 Antanantikas, 18. 
 Anugraha-sarga, 271, 
 
462 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Anumftna, or infer, nca, 145, 274, 
 374, 379, 448. 
 
 applied by Badarayana to Smriti, 
 
 tradition, 147. 
 
 fpr others, 431. 
 
 Anus, or atoms, 426, 440, 445, 446. 
 
 Anusaya, Anlage, 177. 
 
 Anusravika, revealed, 338. 
 
 Anuttamambhasika, 269. 
 
 Anva % ya-vyatireki, 436. 
 
 A nvikshikl, old name of philosophy, 
 76 n. 
 
 1 bifurcation of the old system of, 
 363. 
 
 Anyatva, 271. 
 
 Apara, lower knowledge, 164. 
 
 Apara-vairagya, lower impassive- 
 ness, 452. 
 
 Apaumsheyatva, non-human origin 
 of the Vedas, 207. 
 
 Apavarga, or final beatitude, 373, 
 378, 385, 421, 424- 
 
 bliss of the Nyaya, 372. 
 Apotheosis, 279. 
 Application, Upanaya, 432. 
 Apramoda, 269. 
 Aprainodamaiia, 269. 
 Apramudita, 269. 
 Aprasuta, not produced, 245. 
 Apratiyogitva, 437. 
 
 Apia, not to be translated by aptus, 
 
 146. 
 
 ~ explanation of, 274. 
 Aptava/cana, the true word, 232, 
 
 382. 
 
 Apta-va/rana, 274. 
 
 Aptopadesa = Aptavafcana, 145, 395. 
 Apurva-principle, 211. 
 
 miraculous, 211. 
 
 Arada, teacher of Samkhya-philo- 
 
 ^ sophy, 238. 
 
 Arambha vada, theory of atomic 
 
 agglomeration, 81. 
 Aranyakas, distinction of parts of, 
 
 into Upanishads and Vedantas, 
 
 84 n. 
 
 Arasya, 269. 
 Arksih. the, 119. 
 Artabhuga, 12. 
 
 Arthu, objects of the senses, 163. 
 Arthapatti, assumption, 395. 
 Arthuvadas, glosses, 209. 
 Asakti, weakness, 269. 
 
 Asanta, not-pleasurable, 351. 
 Asat-karyavada, peculiar to Nyaya 
 
 and Vaiseshika, 159. 
 Asatpramuditam, 269. 
 Asaya, Anlage, 320. 
 Asiddhis and Siddhis, 269. 
 Asmarathya, referred to by Bada- 
 
 rdy ana, 91. 
 Asmita, different from Ahamkara, 
 
 343 n. 
 
 Asoka, King, 263 B. c., 26. 
 Asrama, not found in the classical 
 A Upanishads, 236. 
 Asramas of the Buddhists, only 
 
 two, Grihins and Bhikkhus, 
 A 2 3<5. 
 
 Asramas, stations in life, 101. 
 Asramin in the Mai tray. Up., 236. 
 Assertion, Prati^mt, 432. 
 Astitva, yeality, 271. 
 AsumariA-ika, 269. 
 Asunetra, 269. 
 Asupara, 269. 
 Asura, name given to Tvash/n*, and 
 
 to his son Visvarupa, 44. 
 Asuri, 295. 
 Asutara, 269. 
 Asvaghosha's Buddha-fcarita, first 
 
 cent. A. D., 237. 
 Asvala, n. 
 
 Asvalayana Grzhya-Sutras, 239. 
 Asvapati Kaikeya, 14. 
 Atara, 269. 
 Ataratara, 269. 
 Atheism of Purva-Mimamsa, the 
 
 supposed, 210. 
 
 of Kapihi, 302. 
 
 attributed to the Vaiseshika and 
 
 Nyaya and Purva-Mimamsa, 
 
 327- 
 Ativahika-sarira formed of eighteen 
 
 elements, 301. 
 Atma-anatma-viveka, 285. 
 Atmadarsanayogyata, fitness for 
 
 beholtling the Self, 357. 
 Atman, taught by Kshatriyas, 14. 
 
 importance of the word, 70. 
 
 etymology of, 71. 
 
 = breath in Veda, the Mfe, soul, 
 
 7 1 - 
 
 the name of the highest person, 
 
 72. 
 
 and Purusha. 277, 285. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 463 
 
 Atman, not cognitive, 330. 
 
 Atom, invisible, si.vth part of a 
 
 mote, 447. 
 Atoms, Greek origin of theory of, 
 
 446. 
 Atreya, referred to by Badarayarja, 
 
 91. 
 
 Atushii and Tushd, 269. 
 Atyantabhava, 437. 
 Audulomi, referred to by Badara- 
 
 yana, 91. 
 Avapr, 202. 
 Avayavas, or Premisses, i. e. the 
 
 members of a syllogism, 382, 
 
 385. 
 Avidya, history of, 161. 
 
 changed to a Sakti or potentia 
 
 of Brahman, 168. 
 
 not to be accounted for, 172. 
 
 applied to Kant's intuitions of 
 
 sense and his categories, 173. 
 
 and Mithyagruana, 185. 
 
 N. science, 268, 284, 285, 378, 
 
 386. 
 
 an actual power, Sakti, 280. 
 
 origin of, 289. 
 
 Avif a, not having a seed, 342. 
 Avinabhava, Not -without -being, 
 
 377- 
 
 Aviruddhakos, 240. 
 Avisesha, subtle elements, 341 n. 
 Aviveka, 285, 367. 
 Avividi^ha, carelessness, 266. 
 Avrishii, 269. 
 Avyakta, 188, 246, 341 n., 372. 
 
 producing, Prasuta, 245. 
 
 doubtful meaning of, 78. 
 
 chaos, 245. 
 
 Awake, state of being, 174. 
 Ayur-veda, 413. 
 
 BABARA PRAVAHAM, signi- 
 ficative name, 208. 
 
 Babylonian hymns, more modern 
 in thought than tho r 3 of Rig- 
 veda, 34. 
 
 Badarayarca, author of one of the 
 Mimamsas, 85, 116, 120, 371. 
 
 quotes Gaimini, 91, 198. 
 
 identified with Vyasa, 113. 
 Badari, referred to by Badarayana, 
 
 91. 
 Bahutva, 27*1. 
 
 Bana know.* Kfcpilas, Kanadas, 241. 
 Bana's HarshaArarita, 600 A. D.,. 241. 
 Bandha, bondage, 272. 
 Bandhas, or bindings, 349. 
 Bante, Buddhist title, 16. 
 Barhaspatyam, studied by Buddha, 
 
 97- 
 Bathing, ^graduating) the pupil, 
 
 205. 
 
 Berkeley, 194. 
 Bhadrasana, 349. 
 Bhagavatas, follower of Krishna, 
 
 31- 
 Bhartnhari, date of death, 650 A. D., 
 
 9<>> 339- 
 
 refers to the Darsanas, 90. 
 Bhafta, 404. 
 
 Bhava, the real world, the causey 
 
 of Samadhi, 343. 
 Bhikkhu, name of, 236. 
 Bhiksha&arya, or begging, 236. 
 
 and BhaikshaMrya, 236. 
 Bhikshu-Sutras, loss of, referred to 
 
 by Bhaskara&arya, 86. 
 Parasarya, the author, 97, 
 
 117. 
 
 same as Vedanta-Sutras, 117. 
 
 Bhikshus, mendicants, 24, 31. 
 
 Bhur, 150. 
 
 Bhuta-sarga, 272. 
 
 Bhutadi, 249, 250. 
 
 Bhutatman, elementary Atman, 
 
 261. 
 
 Bimbisara, 16, 27. 
 Boar legend that it brought forth 
 
 the earth, allusions in Brah- 
 
 rnanas, 73. 
 Bod da, name found among followers 
 
 of Marii, 64. 
 Boddo (on coins), name of Buddha. 
 
 27. 
 
 Bodhayana, 117, 230. 
 Body, a subtle and a gross, 300. 
 
 &arira, 416. 
 
 is it the same at Atman, 416. 
 Brahma, creator, 18. 
 
 called Vasudeva, 188. 
 Brahmadatta, 16. 
 Brahma-(/ala-sutta, 16, 17, ai. 
 Brahman, various meanings of, 52. 
 
 identified with speech, 65. 
 
 is the sun, 142. 
 
 is Manas, 142. 
 
464 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Brahman is food, 14", 
 
 is Vi^nana, 142. 
 
 as the Word, the first creation 
 
 of divine thought, 145, 149, 150, 
 397- 
 
 or VsJc or Bn'h, eternal, 150. 
 
 is everything, 172. 
 
 as the Kantian Ding an sich, 
 
 172. 
 
 is the world, 280. 
 
 may become to us Brahma-, 281. 
 
 of the Vedanta, 285. 
 
 is Anirva&aniya, un definable, 288. 
 Brahmana, a social title, 17, 
 Brahmanas consist of Vidhis, in- 
 junctions and Arthavadas, 
 glosses, 200. 
 
 Brahmans, two, Saguna and Nir- 
 
 guna, 1 68. 
 Bn'h, parallel form of Vn'dh, 54. 
 
 to grow, c. p. Latin verbum 
 
 and German wort, 55. 
 
 speech, 397. 
 
 Brihaspati, synonymous with Va- 
 A-aspati, lord of speech, 54, 99, 
 
 397- 
 
 Sutras, lost, 86. 
 
 philosophy, the, 94. 
 
 Laukya, 94. 
 
 Angirasa, 94. 
 
 Budh, means to awake, 283. 
 Buddha, a Kshatriya, 10. 
 
 guru, identified with Pythagoras, 
 
 60. 
 
 works studied by, 96. 
 
 did not borrow from Kapila, 103. 
 
 subjects known to, 115. 
 
 borrowed from Kapila no evi- 
 
 dence that, or vice versa, 297. 
 
 later than the classical Upani- 
 
 shads, 314. 
 
 declared against Yoga tortures, 
 
 315- 
 
 Buddha-frarita, the, 237. 
 Buddha's mother, name of, 93. 
 
 denial of an Atman or Brahman, 
 
 316. 
 Buddhi v intellect, 246, 376, 383. 
 
 or Mahat, in a cosmic sense, 
 
 246. 
 
 the lighting up of Prakn'ti, 282. 
 
 of the Nyaya different from that 
 
 of the Samkhyas, 418. 
 
 'Buddhindriyas, five, 25 r. 
 Buddhism, sul sequent to Upam- 
 shads, 236. 
 
 in Tibet, eighth century A. D., 
 
 439- 
 Buddhist-Suttas, reduced to writing 
 
 in the first century B.C., 238. 
 Buddhists support Asat-karyavada, 
 
 159. 
 
 derive the real from the unreal, 
 
 303. 
 
 paid little attention to th> two 
 
 Mimawsas, 365. 
 
 deny present time, 393. 
 
 Butta (first Greek mention of 
 Buduha by Clement of Alexan- 
 dria), 27 
 
 CALF, the new-born year, 51 n. 
 Case, five members of a (Adhi- 
 
 karana), 204. 
 Caste, Portug. casto, 9. 
 Castes, origin of, in India, 9, 10, 
 Categories of the Nyaya, 440. 
 Causal state of Brahman, 188. 
 Causation, chain of, 378. 
 Cause and effect, Vedkntist theory 
 
 of, 155- 
 with them are the same thing, 
 
 seen from different points, 155. 
 Causes, are intimate, non-intimate, 
 
 and instrumental, 443 
 Chronology of thought, 120. 
 Cleanthes and Boethius, 322. 
 Clement of Alexandria, 27. 
 
 knows name of Butta, 27, 62. 
 
 Coining money, 61. 
 Colebrooke on the Gunas, 262. 
 Comparison, Upamana, 382. 
 Conclusion, Nigamana, 432. 
 Conditions, Upadhis, of forming 
 
 a Vyapti, or universal rule, 
 
 434- 
 
 Con-scien^ia, Sam-vid, 359. 
 Consideration, Paramarsa, 430. 
 Creation, or causation, 155. 
 
 the result of Nescience, 154. 
 
 proceeds from Brahman, 155, 
 
 157. 
 
 caused by Maya or Avidya, 192. 
 Cripple who could not walk, and 
 
 cripple who could not see, 302. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 465 
 
 PAitSHA, force, one meaning of 
 
 Brahman, 70. 
 Dakshina-ba idha, bondage, 234. 
 
 gifts to priests, 272. 
 Damascius says Brahmaiis lived at 
 
 Alexandria saec. V, 62. 
 
 Dandasana, 349. 
 
 Darsanns, or systems, the six all 
 orthodox, 288, 439. 
 
 Death, state of, 174. 
 
 Deity, existence of a, 422. 
 
 Deussen, Professor, theory of evo- 
 lution of Word and Brahman, 
 70. 
 
 Deva, supreme, never assented by 
 Kapila, 302. 
 
 Devadhammikas, 240. 
 
 worshippers of the Devas, 241. 
 
 Devas, thirty-three in number, ac- 
 cording to Rig- veda and Avesta, 
 difficulty of filling up this 
 number, 38. 
 
 Devayana, path of the gods, 176. 
 Devotion to the Lord, one of many 
 
 expedients, 319. 
 Dhanna, duty, 199, 440. 
 Dharmakirfcti, seventh century, 364, 
 
 439- 
 Dharmamegha, cloud of virtue, 
 
 357- 
 
 Dharmarakshita, a sage, 439. 
 
 Dharmottara, ninth century, de- 
 fended Dharmakirtti, 365. 
 
 Dhatri, maker, name given to the 
 one god, 47. 
 
 Dhishana (Bn'haspati), 457. 
 
 Dhriti, energy, 266. 
 
 Dhyanas (GMna), four, 20. 
 
 Dignaga, the logician, 364. 
 
 Dignaga' s writings lost, 365 n. 
 
 Nyaya-sainu/c/eaya, a Tibetan 
 translation of, 365 n. 
 
 ^-ipamkara Srigwana, 439. 
 Distinction of good and eyil, 180. 
 Divakara, a sage, 600 A. D., 30. 
 Divine thinker, every word au act 
 
 of a, 150. 
 Divyadasa Datta, living Vedantist, 
 
 155, 105- 
 
 Dosha, faults, 421. 
 Dreaming, state of, 174. 
 Drishfam. what is seen, 274. 
 , example, 385. 
 
 Drumstick and Irum together cbn- 
 vey, even to the deaf, the idea 
 of sound, 380. 
 
 Dual gfids, two or three gods work- 
 ing together, tendency towards 
 unity among the gods, 40. 
 
 Duftkha, puin, 274, 367, 421. 
 
 Du&khanta, or Nirvana, 108, 370. 
 
 EFFECT, an, only a new manifesta- 
 tion, dogma characteristic of 
 the Samkhya, 158. 
 
 Ekagrata, concentration, 357. 
 
 Emancipation, Apavarga, 425. 
 
 Eschatology, 175. 
 
 Esse is percipi or pertipere, 291. 
 
 Eternal punishment, 276. 
 
 Evolution, Pariwama, 280. 
 
 of works, the independent. 331. 
 Exercises, Abhyasa, 338. 
 Exposition, five-mem bered form of, 
 
 432. 
 
 FABLES in the Sutras, 305. 
 Fa-hian visits India, 399-414 A. D., 
 
 27. 
 
 Fancy chiefly due to words, 337. 
 Fetishism or Totemism, did they 
 
 precede the Aryan theogony? 
 
 36. 
 Fifth element, called aKa.r-ov6fjux.rovj 
 
 386. 
 First and last inference, Vita, or 
 
 straightforward, 382. 
 Fivefold division of tho vital spirit, 
 
 174. 
 Four or five elements, the, 99. 
 
 states, the, 174. 
 
 Pramanas, according to Gotama, 
 
 374- 
 Freedom from passions, Vairagya, 
 
 338. 
 
 or beatitude depends on philo- 
 
 sophy, 391. 
 Frog- wife, the, 316. 
 
 &AIMINI, author of one of the 
 Miniawsiis, 85. 371. 
 
 referred to by Badaraya?ia, 91, 
 
 198. 
 
 his work atheistic, 457, 
 
 and Vyasa, 454. 
 
 Sutras, contents of, soo. 
 
466 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Gaina literature, 4^8, 439. 
 Gainas, in white robes, 31. 
 (?alpa, sophistical wrangling, 389. 
 Gamgesa Upadhyaya, fourteenth 
 
 century, 366. 
 Ganaka, king of Mithila, the Vide- 
 
 ha, 11-13, a ? 
 
 Ganganatha Jha, of Bombay, 318. 
 Gargi Vafc&knavi, n. 
 tfati, kith and caste, 9. 
 
 birth or genus, a transitio in 
 
 cUterum (jenus, 389. 
 
 futility, 389. 
 Gatilakas, 241, 
 Gaudapada, date of, 223, 
 Gauri-Sawkar, Mount, 184. 
 Ghora, fearful, 253. 
 Ginabhadra, eighth century, 438. 
 Glvanxnukti, 180, 360. 
 Gflanayoga, 311, 347. 
 Gfiatiputra, teacher mentioned in 
 
 Buddhist annals, the Nirgran- 
 
 tha, founder of Gainism, 89. 
 Gnomina, nomina, 376. 
 God in the beginning created 
 
 namos and forms of things, 
 
 398. 
 Gods of the Vedic people, the 
 
 agents postulated behind the 
 
 great phenomena of nature, 36. 
 Gondaphoros, king, authenticated 
 
 as Gondophares, 63. 
 G&rres on Sk. terms retained by 
 
 the Greeks, 386. 
 
 Gosha-Samgha, from Bactria, 440. 
 Gosaliputra, teacher mentioned in 
 
 Buddhist Annals, 89. 
 Gotama and Kanada, philosophies 
 
 of, 80. 
 
 Gotamakas, 240. 
 
 Greek accounts of India, 26, 386. 
 Gunas, constituents of nature, lii. 
 
 the three, in, 216, 255, 256, 
 
 262, 263, 357. 
 
 as Dravyuni, matter, 263. 
 
 equilibrium of the three, 263. 
 
 of Prakrit i, 341 n. 
 
 not qualities, but substantial, 
 
 357- 
 Gyotishtoma sacrifice, 209. 
 
 HAMMER OF FOLLY, Mohamud- 
 gara, 181 
 
 Haribhadra, his 
 
 uAr/caya-sutfam, 438. 
 
 died, 528 A. D., 439. 
 Harihara, 256, 313. 
 Harsha, King, 600 A. D., 27. 
 
 history of, by Ban*, 30. 
 
 court of, 365. 
 
 Ha&a, or Kriya-yoga, 344, 345. 
 
 Head, forfeited ip disputations, 13. 
 
 Heart, seat of consciousness, 356. 
 
 Hegel's thesis, antithesis, and syn- 
 thesis, 263. 
 
 Henotheism = phase in which God 
 is addressed as if the only god 
 in existence, with forgetfulness 
 of all others, 40. 
 
 Herbart's Selbsfa-hattung des Realm, 
 
 159- 
 
 philosophy, 174. 
 Hetvabhasas, specious arguments, 
 
 four kinds, 389. 
 
 Hiouen-thsang, Buddhist pilgrim, 
 visits India, 629-645 A. D,, 27. 
 
 did not translate the Vaiseshika- 
 
 Sutras by Kanada, 242. 
 Hiranyagarbha, 256, 313. 
 Holenmerian theory of Plotinus 
 
 and Henry More, 173. 
 Homoiousia, 321. 
 Human souls reborn in animal and 
 
 vegetable bodies (in Upani- 
 
 shads), 105. 
 
 Hume's view of causality, 159. 
 Hyades, stars marking time of 
 
 rain, 37. 
 
 Hylobioi, forest-dwellers, 27. 
 Hymn to the Unknown God, 46. 
 Hymns, adaptations of, 201. 
 Hypnotic states, how produced, 365, 
 Hypnotism, 349. 
 
 ICHNEUMON AND SNAKE, 380. 
 Idealism, is Samkhya? 293. 
 Identity, Sabhavyam, 177. 
 Idolatry, a necessity of our nature 
 
 165. 
 
 Ignorance, or Mithyagfftana, 391, 
 Immortality of the soul, 105. 
 India, a nation of philosophers, 7. 
 
 early philosophers in, 8. 
 Indian coinage, 60. 
 
 leaven in our thoughts, 194, 385. 
 
 philosophy, books on, 368, 369, 
 
INDEX. 
 
 467 
 
 Indian logic, 390. 
 
 Individual soul is Brahman, not 
 
 vice twsfl, 154. 
 Xndra, the rainer, 35. 
 Indriyagraya, subjugation of senses, 
 
 357- 
 Indriyas, five senses, 163, 415. 
 
 sense, 173. 
 Indu, the rain, 55. 
 Inference, Anum&na, 379. 
 
 thrse kinds of, 379, 382, 
 
 Smfiti, 397. 
 Instance, Udaharana, 432. 
 Inward-turned thought, Pratyak- 
 
 fcetana, 323. 
 
 tsvara exists phenomenally only, 
 170. 
 
 the Lord, 188. 
 
 Krishna, 224. 
 
 or personal Lord, denial of, not 
 
 in the original Samkhya, 230. 
 
 abc T e all Purushas, 320. 
 -T- a Punish a, 320. 
 
 one of many souls, 325, 344. 
 
 perception of the, 327, 328. 
 
 a maker, a Sat-kara, 328. 
 tsvaras, not many, 321. 
 
 JATI, of Asvaparanta, 440. 
 
 KAIVALYA, aloneness, 345, 356, 
 
 359, 3?c, 373- 
 Kaivalva-pada, 334. 
 
 means isolation qf the soul, 334. 
 Kaivalya/347, 359. 
 
 Kaiyafa, 404. 
 
 jfifakrapravartana, the turning of 
 the wheel, 24. 
 
 Kakuda Katyayana, teacher men- 
 tioned in Buddhist annals, 
 
 89. 
 Kalanos (Kalyana) gymnosophist, 
 
 386. 
 Kalidasa, alludes to the logician 
 
 Dignaga, 364. 
 Kanada, 362, 372, 440. 
 /vandrakanta Tarkulunkara, author 
 
 of Sanskrit treatise, 87 n. 
 Kanishka, King, 85-106 A. .. 440. 
 
 his Great Council, under 
 
 Vasumitra and Purnakaj 440. 
 an-ti, not a good Chinese scholar, 
 
 222. 
 
 Kapila and Pataffcali, 307. 
 
 and Buddha, existence side by 
 
 si<Je of their systems, 316. 
 
 appeals to the Veda, 326 
 
 his atheism, 302. 
 
 "did 'Buddha borrow from? 
 240. 
 
 did not borrow from Buddha, 
 
 103. 
 Sutras, age of, 220, 364. 
 
 revived the Sawkhva, 243 n. 
 vastu or vastu, birthplace of 
 
 Buddha, 238. 
 
 Kapya Patawfcala, 307 n. 
 
 Karana and Karana, difference be- 
 tween, 252, 443. 
 
 Karana vasthu, causal state of Brah- 
 man, 109, 188. 
 
 Karikas, 275, 306. 
 
 Karman, 109. 
 
 or deed, 171, 440. 
 
 theory of, 330, 371. 
 Karmatmans, 250, 267. 
 Karmayoga, 311. 
 Karmayonis, five, 266. 
 Karmendriyas, five, 252. 
 Karshnagini, referred to by Badara- 
 
 yana, 91. 
 
 .Karva, synonym of Buddha, 99. 
 Jfarvaka, 99. 
 
 system, 457. 
 
 Xarvakas admitted but one source 
 of knowledge, 143. 
 
 sensualists, 86. 
 
 Karya-karanabheda, the non-differ- 
 ence, or substantial identity, 
 of cause and effect, 156. 
 
 Karyesvara, 456. 
 
 Kasakritsna, referred to by Badara- 
 
 yawa, 91. 
 
 Kasawara of Japan, died, 223. 
 KaiantraAManda/isprakriya, modern 
 
 Sanskrit treatis? in Sutras, 87 n. 
 Kanaka, author of the, 208. 
 Kauthuma, author of the, 208. 
 A'eshJa, gesture, 396, 429. 
 Kevalanvayi, 436. 
 Kevala-vyatireki, 436. 
 Kh&\&, quibbling, 389. 
 Khyati, discrimination, 248. 
 Kinv&t bridge, had antecedents in 
 
 tlie Veda, 63. 
 JSlt, Supreme Hpirit, 187. 
 
 H h 2 
 
468 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Kitta, 336. 
 
 work of the Manas, 359. 
 Klamaths, a N. American race, 
 
 their view of creation, 03. 
 Knowledge alone leads to Mokslia, 
 166. 
 
 true, or Samyagdarsana, 179. ^ 
 
 arises from conjunction of At- 
 
 man with Manas, 419. 
 
 not eternal, 421. 
 
 of ideas, not things, 426. 
 
 characteristic feature of Self, 
 
 428. 
 Kramamukti, slow advance towards 
 
 freedom, 164. 
 Krishna, the hero of the Bhagavad- 
 
 gita, of Kshatriya origin, 30. 
 
 similarity of name with Chris tos, 
 
 61. 
 
 Dvaipayana, name for Badara- 
 
 yawa, 117. 
 Krittikas, the time for mowing, no 
 
 star- worship in India, 37. 
 Kriyaphalas, the four, 206. 
 Kriyayoga, 347, 349. 
 
 working Yoga, 345. 
 Krypto-buddhists, 306. 
 Kshatriyas, as philosophers, 8. 
 Kumar ila Bhal/a, 210. 
 Kusuruvinda Auddalaki, 208. 
 
 , secondary applica- 
 tion of a word, 177. 
 
 Language, thoughts on, 396, 397, 
 402. 
 
 Laukayatika, 94. 
 
 Laukayatikas, materialists, 86. 
 
 Letters, idea of, elaborated by the 
 Hindus before they knew the 
 Semitic alphabet, 403. 
 
 have no raison d'etre, 407. 
 Liwgamatra, i. e. Buddhi, 341 n. 
 Logic, 375. 
 
 Logos, the result of Avidya, 183. 
 
 or Sophia, 399. 
 
 Lokayata, used by Buddhists for 
 philosophy in general, 99. 
 
 or world- wide system, 99. 
 
 atheistic, =276, 276 n. 
 Lokayatikas, atheists, 31. 
 
 or Laukayatikas, heretics, 98. 
 Lokayita system, 437. 
 
 MADHAVA'S account of Nyaya, 
 
 377- 
 
 Madhusudana, 80, 450. 
 Madhyamika Vritti by ITandra 
 
 Kirtti, 366. 
 Madras, the, 209. 
 Magandikas, 240. 
 Mahabharata, as a law-book, 30. 
 Mahabhutas, 252. 
 Mahat is not Phenician Mot, 259. 
 Maitrayana Upanishad, 112. 
 Manas, central organ of perception, 
 
 163, 292. 
 
 mind, 173, 252, 367, 416. 
 
 brarn, 292. 
 
 point of attention, 292. 
 
 a mere instrument, 292. 
 
 is cognitive, 330. 
 
 different from Buddhi, 336. 
 
 or mind, as Arm or atom, 383, 
 
 384, 421. 
 
 as nitya, eternal, 384. 
 
 eternal and numerous, 384. 
 
 many manifestations of, 418. 
 
 ninth and last of the Dravyas, 
 
 445- 
 
 Manifestation or intuition, 143. 
 
 Manu, 307. 
 
 Maruts, eleven, help to make up 
 the thirty- three Devas, 39. 
 
 Maurya, name of, doubtful, 119. 
 
 M. M.'s Indian Logic, 368* 
 
 Maya, or Mayadevi, name of Bud- 
 dha's mother, 93. 
 
 not mentioned in the old Upani- 
 
 shads, 93. 
 
 illusion, 157, 162, 185, 280, 281. 
 
 sometimes called Samvriti, 367. 
 
 doctrine, a disguised Buddhism, 
 
 457- 
 Meaning of a word, the, is that 
 
 which it chiefly aims at, 453. 
 Meditation with or without n 
 
 obj. 3t, 341. 
 
 Bhavana, 342. 
 Megasthenes, description by, 305 
 
 B. c., 26. 
 Memory, 419. 
 Menandros, Greek king, converses 
 
 with Buddhist, philosophers 
 
 63- 
 
 Meru, 274. 
 Metaphors, 195, 
 
INDEX. 
 
 469 
 
 Metempsychosis, Sawsara, 104. 
 Milinda(Meiiander) and Nagasena, 
 
 dialogues, importance of, 63. 
 Mimamsa, quoted in Upanishads, 5. 
 
 use of, in Upanishads, 84, 
 
 method, 209. 
 Mimawsas, two, 308, 371. 
 
 Nyaya and Vaiseshika, 590. 
 
 Mimawsaka, Darsana, referred to 
 
 by Bhartrihiri, 90. 
 Mimamsakas require Sabda to be 
 
 eternal, 400. 
 
 maintained the superhuman 
 
 origin of the Vedas, 207. 
 Mind, relation to language, 67. 
 
 dispute with speech, 69. 
 
 for Manas, 336, 383. 
 
 modified by objects perceived, 
 
 345 
 
 Miracles, 352. 
 
 Misdeos, name for Vasu Deva on 
 
 Ir do-Parthian coins, 63. 
 Mnemonic literature in India, 3, 
 
 92. 204. 
 of India, reduced to writing, 
 
 Tl8. 
 
 Moksha, highest aim of Kapila, 
 
 273- 
 Mokshadeva, or Master of the Tripi- 
 
 te,ka, Sanskrit name of Hiouen- 
 
 thsang, 29. 
 Mokshar>harma, 455. 
 Monotheism, Monism, tendencies 
 
 working together produce idea 
 
 of supreme personality, 41. 
 Morality depends on prescriptive 
 
 sacra or on Samaya, 390. 
 More, Henry, Holenmerian theory 
 
 of, 173. 
 
 MudT&a, stupid, 353. 
 Mudras, 349. 
 Mukhya-Prana, 163, 174. 
 
 vital spirit, as first Upadhi, 163. 
 
 the vital spirit, 301. 
 Mulikarthas, 270. 
 Munrfasavakas, 240. 
 Murdhanya Nfidi, capital vein, 176. 
 
 NACHEIlN ANDER AND NEBEN- 
 
 EINANDER, 235. 
 Nagargruna, author of the Madhya- 
 
 mika-.Sutras, 366, 396. 
 
 first century A. D., 366. 
 
 NaishMika, 22. 
 
 Naiyayika derives what is not yet 
 
 from what is, 303. 
 Naiyay.kas believe in God as a 
 
 Creator, 31. 
 
 hold the Veda to be non-eternal, 
 
 332. 
 Namadha, name-giver, name given 
 
 to the one God, 47. 
 Nainadheya, technical name of 
 
 each sacrifice, 200. 
 Namarupa, 157. 
 
 correspond to the Greek Logoi, 
 
 157. 
 
 Narayana is Brahman, 142. 
 Nasadiya hymn, 49. 
 Nastika, heretics, 98, 279, 
 
 or .ZCarvaka system, 99. 
 Nate-Sutras, Silalin author of, 97! 
 Nebeneinander, truerJjey to growth 
 
 of philosophical ideas than the 
 Nacheinander, 74. 
 
 Nescience, cosmical, 154. 
 
 Newton's system, and Darwin's 
 theory of evolution, 326. 
 
 Niebuhr's derivation of Indian 
 philosophy from Greece, 387. 
 
 Nigantaas, 240, 241. 
 
 Nigrahasthana, unfitness for dis- 
 cussion, 389. 
 
 Niranumana, 249, 350, 268. 
 
 Niratisaya, ncn plus idtra, 322. 
 
 Niratman (selbqflos), 262. 
 
 Nirnaya, ascertainment, 388. 
 
 Nirodha, restraint, 336. 
 
 Nirvana, 296, 360, 373. 
 
 also Nirvataft, 373. 
 
 not a technical term in Panini's 
 
 time, 373. 
 
 the blowing out of passions, 373. 
 
 or Dufckhanta, 108. 
 Nirvikalpa, one kind of Pratyaksha, 
 
 144. 
 
 Nirvitarka, 346. 
 Northern Kurus, 374. 
 Notion, Anubhava, 383. 
 Nyasa, writing (Vyasa?), 118. 
 Nyaya-Sutras, 83. 
 
 not found in Upanishads, 84. 
 
 modern, confined to Pramana, 
 
 39i- 
 
 later books of the, 391. 
 Nyayii-mala-vistarn , 20 1 . 
 
INDEX. 
 
 Nyaya and Vni*eiiiika represent 
 
 Self endowed with qualities. 
 
 288. 
 a first step towards truth, 
 
 388, 308. 
 
 systems, 331, 362, 373. 
 
 relation between, 362. 
 
 books on, 369. 
 
 Nyaya -philosophy, history of, 363, 
 
 cS 9 . 
 
 also applicable to the Purva- 
 
 Mimawta, 369. 
 
 studied first century A. D., 396 n. 
 Nyaya on Sphofei, 413. 
 
 # recognised the Veda, 417. 
 
 calls Yoga to its aid, 427. 
 
 OM, 322. 
 
 contraction of Avam, 323. 
 Organic body, the, 163. 
 
 PAD.X.NI, appliances. 252. 
 Padartha, not categories, 76, 375. 
 
 the meaning of the word, 376. 
 Pad&rthas of Kanada, the five, 
 
 77- 
 
 (omne scfbile), 363. 
 Padma-Purawa, 456. 
 Padma Sarabhava, 439. 
 Padmasana. 348. 
 Pain, nature of, 376. 
 
 meaning of, 297. 
 
 Paksha, or memixv of a Vyapti, 
 43o. 
 
 or terminus minor, 430. 
 Pakshilasvamin, 365. 
 Palm-leaves pierced, 421. 
 
 Pan-- ni, lost Sutras known to, 97. 
 Panini's principle as to letters 
 
 forming a word, 404. 
 Paftftadasi, 215. 
 
 author of the, quotes the Madh- 
 
 yamikas, 366. 
 Panfraratra, account of system in 
 
 Prasthana Bheda, 81. 
 PaJMpratras, 31. 
 PajWcasikha, philosopher referred to 
 
 in-Sawkhya-Sutras, 90, 295. 
 Pantaenus in India, one of the 
 
 teachers of Clement, 62. 
 fara, higher knowledge. 164. 
 Parables, Buddhist love of teaching 
 
 by, 306. 
 
 Parft gati, the highest poal,.2 4 . 
 Parama-tavara, highest Lord, 334. 
 Pai*amartha, a law t jacher, A. i>. 
 
 557"589, 234. 
 Paramarthika, real, 367. 
 Paramatman is Isvara, but tsvara 
 
 is not Paramatman 5 434. 
 Parampara, tradition, as handed 
 
 down orally, 04. 
 
 mnemonic literature, ai8. 
 
 of the Brahmaus, 306. 
 Parasara, 455. 
 
 Parasarya (Vyasa), author of Bhik- 
 shu-Sutras, 97, 117. 
 
 Parava^a, controversies, 325. 
 
 Paravairagya, higher impassive- 
 ness, 452. 
 
 Paribhagrakas, 241. 
 
 Parikshit, old King, is. 
 
 Pariwama, evolution, 185, 280. 
 
 Parinama-vada, theory of evolution, 
 81. 
 
 Parivragraka, or Bhikshu, 24. 
 
 an itinerant friar, a* 
 
 (mendicants), 31. 
 
 Pasupata, account of system in 
 
 Prasthana Bheda, 81. 
 Patoliputra, Buddhist Council at, 
 
 276 B.C., 25. 
 Pata%ali, author of Yoga-Sutras, 
 
 and Patangrali, author of the 
 
 Mahabhashya, 118. 
 
 the grammarian, age of, w ii9. 
 
 by no means settled; 119. 
 
 second century B.C.. 220. 
 
 the philosopher may be the 
 
 same as the grammarian, 313. 
 
 called Phanin, or Sesha, 313. 
 
 date" of, only constructive, 314. 
 
 called a portion of Sankarshana 
 
 or Ananta, 314, 
 
 his theistic Sawkhya-philosophy, 
 
 318. 
 
 Patikka Samuppada, 378. 
 Perception, Pratyaksha, 379. 
 
 contact of sense with its object, 
 
 393. 
 
 contact of thp senses and mind, 
 
 39 2 - 
 
 contact of mind and the Self, 392, 
 
 Sruti, 397. 
 
 Perceptions, always perceived as 
 perceptions of something, 161. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 47' 
 
 Peoftfmasm 106. 
 
 Phala, rewards, 421, 495. 
 
 Phanibhartn, 314. 
 
 Phanin, name for Pataflgali, 313, 
 
 Phenomenal and fictitious, differ- 
 ence between, 185. 
 Philosophical ideas, common, 104. 
 systems, parallel development 
 
 the time of Buddha, 240. 
 
 Philosophies and Sutraa, relative 
 age of, 219. 
 
 Philosophy, different ways of study- 
 ing, 182. 
 
 Pin run through sheets of a MS. 
 seems simultaneous, but is 
 successive, 393. 
 
 Pitriyana, path of the fathers, 176. 
 
 Pleiades, the return of calmer 
 weather, 37. 
 
 Plotiius, Holenmerian theory of, 
 
 173- 
 Postures, Yogarigas, 347. 
 
 and tortures, 355. 
 Prabhakara, commentator on the 
 
 Mimamsa, 210. 
 
 a Mimamsaka, 499. 
 Practical life (Vyavahara), 294. 
 
 purposes (Vyavaharartham), 160. 
 Pradhana, Praknti, 269, 315, 341 n. 
 Pradynmna, 188. 
 
 Pragrapati, supreme god, 42* 
 
 attains more personal char- 
 acter, 45. 
 
 called Visva, &c. , 260. 
 
 tradition from, 307 . 
 
 Pra</na, or Giva, individual soul, 
 
 216, 260, 346. 
 Prakaranasama, argumen telling 
 
 on both sides, 388. 
 Prafci, previous, 197. 
 Prafcfcfcanna-Bauddhas, 306. 
 Prakriti, nature, potential matter, 
 
 157. 
 
 not the author of creation, 158. 
 
 wrongly translated by nature, 
 
 158 
 
 nature, known as Maya (magic), 
 
 162. 
 
 or Urstoff, 282. 
 
 is not aj work when not perceived 
 
 by a Purusha, 282. 
 
 Prakrtti, different from nature, 
 <t>v(Tis, 290. 
 
 Praksa, or light, 291. 
 
 firs'- wakened to life by disturb- 
 
 ance of its three constituents, 
 291. 
 
 In all her disguises, Purusha and 
 
 the dancer, 295. 
 Prakn'ti-purusha-viveka, 285. 
 Prakntilaya, 248. 
 
 absorbed in Prakrtti, 343, 343. 
 Prakn'tis, eight, 290. 
 Prakriti's unselfishness, 299. 
 Pralaya, the idea of, recent, no. 
 Pralayas, absorptions of the whole 
 
 world, 109. 
 
 Pramana, only one admitted by the 
 Lokayatas, 99. 
 
 instrument of measuring, 143. 
 Pramana, 374, 378. 
 Pramana-samufc&aya, the Tibetan 
 
 version, 396. 
 Pramanas, 143. 
 
 three essential, 144. 
 
 the three go back to one, 
 
 145- 
 
 authoritative sources of know- 
 
 ledge. 202. 
 
 of (ruimini, 202. 
 
 three, 273, 274. 
 
 eight, 395. 
 
 in different Philosophical 
 
 Schools, 428. 
 Prameya, 374, : 375> 382. 
 Prameyas, objects of knowledge, 
 
 392, 415, 421. 
 Pra?ia breath, 47. 
 Pranas, vital spirits, 173. 
 Pranava, 322. 
 
 the inner guide, 335. 
 Prawayamas, 344, 347. 
 Prasenagrit, 27. 
 
 Prasthana-bheda, treatise on philo- 
 sophical literature, 75. 
 
 Pratipathi-karmam, 201. 
 Pratisakhyas, 218. 
 Pratisan/rara is dissolution, 264. 
 Pratitya, dependent or conditioned, 
 
 367 n. 
 
 Pratityatva, 367^ 
 Pratiyogitva, 437. 
 Pratyfihara, complete abstraction, 
 
 349- 
 
472 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Pratyaksha, sense perception, 144, 
 
 73, 374- 
 
 two kinds of, 144. 
 
 perception and Anumara, in- 
 
 ference, ignored by Badara- 
 yana, 146. 
 
 applied by Badarayana to Sruti 
 
 (revelation), 147. 
 
 perception, 379, 392. 
 Pravn'tti, activity, 421. 
 Prayoga-vidhis, 200. 
 Prayograna, purpose, 385. 
 Presumption (Arthapatti), 203. 
 Pretyabhava, transmigration, 384, 
 
 421, 422. 
 
 Primeval waters, existing apart 
 from Pragrapati, 72. 
 
 Punarukti, useless repetition, 226. 
 
 Purana Kasyapa, teacher men- 
 tioned in Buddhist annals, 89. 
 
 Puratana, 307. 
 
 Purchas, 1613, mentions castes of 
 Banians, 9. 
 
 Purusha = man, name given to the 
 one god, 47. 
 
 (soul) does not migrate, but the 
 
 Sukshma-sarira, subtle body, 
 105. 
 Purusha, 253, 277. 
 
 name of supreme deity, 253, 
 
 34i. 
 
 one or many ? 256. 
 
 never the material cause of the 
 
 universe, 286. 
 
 state of, when free, 296. 
 
 rendered by Self, not by man, 
 
 3" n. 
 
 the 25th Tattva, 342. 
 Purushas of the Sawkhya, many, 
 
 285, 371. 
 
 Purushottama, 329. 
 Purva, the prius, 381.' 
 Purva/caryas, 330. 
 Purva-Mimamsa, the first step, 141. 
 
 196, 200, 202, 213. 
 
 and Uttara-Mimamsa, 213. 
 
 charged with atheism, 321. 
 
 Purvapaksha, 204, 435. 
 Purvavat preceded by a prius, 379. 
 Pythagoras, identified with Bud- 
 dha-guru, 60. 
 
 claimed a subtle covering for the 
 
 soul, 300. 
 
 QUALITIES, Guna, 441 
 
 Quality, intang ble in sound, 401 
 
 RA0AGJRIHA, Buddhist Council at, 
 
 477 B. c., 25. 
 
 Ragra-yoga, true Yoga, 345. 
 Raghuvawsa of Kalidasa, 207. 
 Rahu, head of, 337. 
 Raikva and Ganasruti, 14. 
 Rajendralal Mitra, 324, 325, 341, 358. 
 Ramanugra, lived twelfth century 
 
 A. D., 185. 
 
 his view of universe, 280. 
 Ramanugra's system called Visishfa- 
 
 Advaita, 187. 
 
 Real and the phenomenal, differ- 
 ence between the, 161. 
 Reason, Hetu, 432. 
 Receptacle, Asraya, or subject, 425. 
 Religion and philosophy have 
 
 worked together harmoniously 
 
 in India alone, 409. 
 Religious persecution, Buddhists 
 
 and Brahman*, 29. 
 Religious and Popular Poetry of 
 
 Vcdic Age, not one hundredth 
 
 part of it remains, 41. 
 Remembering is not wiping out, 
 
 338. 
 Remembrance, Smarawa, 383. 
 
 can make our mouths water, 
 
 416. 
 
 Jftddhis, or Aisvaryas, 350. 
 
 Rig-veda, a fragment only, does not 
 represent whole of Vedic my- 
 thology and religion, 42. 
 
 Jtttambhara, truth-bearing, 346. 
 
 Ritter, his contempt of the Nyaya, 
 76, 390. 
 
 Root, the, expresses Bhava, a state, 
 or Kriya, action, 405. 
 
 SABDA, the word, 274, 394, 399, 
 404, 448. 
 
 or wora, a Pramawa, 145, 374, 
 
 382. 
 
 iSabdanusasanam, 31 7 n. 
 Sabhapati Svamy^, 352, 353. 
 Sacrifice was Karman, woMc, 198. 
 Sadhana-pada, 334. 
 Sadness cleaves to all finite life, 
 
 297. 
 Saiva and Pasupata systems, 457. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 473 
 
 Sakalya, -3. 
 /Sakayanya, a Saka, 14. 
 Sa/c-fcid-aiinnda, being, perceiving, 
 
 blessed, Brahman called, 169. 
 Sakshatkara, or manifestation, 142. 
 Sakti, power, 157, 44*- 
 Samadhi, obstacles to, 323. 
 
 meditation or absorption. 334, 
 
 34i, 35o. - 
 
 or Samapatti, 346. 
 
 ' Samadhi, Apragrnata, 347, 427. 
 Samanya. genus, 441, 447. 
 Samanyato Drtshia, constantly seen 
 
 together, 380. 
 SainasM, 282. 
 Samavaya, intimate connection, 
 
 37^ 447- 
 Sambhava, probability, 395. 
 
 equivalence, 429. 
 Sawgati, connection, 204, 205. 
 Saw0aya-Vaira#i-putra, teacher 
 
 mentioned in Buddhist annals, 
 
 89. 
 
 Sawgiti, a council (symphony), 4. 
 Samkara, literary works referred to 
 
 by, 114. 
 
 his contempt of ritualism, 165, 
 
 lived eighth century A. i>., 186. 
 
 and. B4manu<?a, points of differ- 
 
 ence, 190. 
 
 no better than Buddhism, 327. 
 
 opposed to Sphofo, 410. 
 Samkarshana, 188. 
 Samkarsha'/ia-kantfa, consists of four 
 
 chapters, 78. 
 Samkharas, the, 378. 
 Samkhya, distinguished from other 
 
 Vedanta-philosophies, 80. 
 Samkhya-yoga, name occurs in 
 
 Upanishads, 84. 
 Samkhya-Darsana, referred to by 
 
 Bhartn'hari, 90. 
 r-amkhya, mentioned in Buddhist 
 
 texts, 93. 
 
 and Yoga systems are Smnti, 
 
 147. 
 
 dogma of effect, 158, 159* 
 
 the duplistic, 160. 
 
 philosophy, 215. 
 
 ideas, influence of, 216. 
 
 atheistic, yet orthodox, 231. 279, 
 
 title of two systems, Samkhya 
 
 and Yoga, 262 n. 
 
 Sawkhya, true meaning of, 275. 
 
 Aviveka, 281. 
 
 immorality of the, 304 
 
 parables, 305. 
 Samkhya-Yoga, 306. 
 
 Samkhya as Satkaryavada the op- 
 posite of the Buddhist view oi 
 "the world, 367. 
 
 and Yoga treated by Madhusu- 
 
 dana as different from tiie two 
 Mimawsas, 450. 
 
 knowledge, superior to other 
 
 systems, 454. 
 
 Samkhya-karikas, the, 222. 
 exist in a Chinese translation, 
 
 222. 
 
 Samkhya-Sutras, date of, 1380 A.D., 
 84. 
 
 fourteenth century A. D., 220. 
 
 Samkhya- yogins, the, 335. 
 Samkhyas, followers of Kapila, 31. 
 
 derive what is not, from what 
 
 is, 383. 
 
 SamkoMta, 188. 
 Samradhanam, accomplishment, 
 
 169. 
 
 Sawsara, can be stopped, 277. 
 Samsaya, 207. 
 
 or doubt, 385. 
 Samskara, instincts, 320, 342. 
 Samskaras and Vasanas, 357. 
 
 dispositions, 358, 442. 
 Samvrt'tika, 367. 
 
 Samyama constituted of Dharana, 
 Dhyana and Samadhi, 350. 
 
 leads to Siddhis, perfection, 350. 
 
 Sananda, joyous, 342. 
 
 Sanandana Afcarya, philosopher re- 
 ferred to in Samkhya-Sutras, 
 90. 
 
 San&ara is evolution, 264. 
 Sanskrit proper names, 313. 
 Santa, pleasurable, 252. 
 tfanti Rakshita, 439. 
 Sanumana, 249, 250. 
 
 with inference, 267. 
 Sarira, body, 173, 416. 
 Sarmanas, 26. 
 
 Sasmita, with false conceit, 342. 
 Sastra, the, 290. 
 
 Sat-karyavada, every effect pr 
 exists, 159, 367. 
 
 something real, 303. 
 
474 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Sattva, 356, 357. m 
 Saumanasya, serenity, 357. 
 Savage tribes, their philosophy, 5. 
 Savigra, with a seed, 343. 
 Savikalpa, one kind of Pratyaksha, 
 
 144. 
 Savifcara, deliberative, 24% 346. 
 
 and Nirvifcara, 346. 
 Savifcarka, argumentative, 342, 346. 
 Savittv (Asura), the enlivener, one 
 
 of the agents of recurring 
 events 01 nature, spoken of in 
 Veda, 37. 
 
 Schopenhauer on the Persian trans- 
 lation of the Upanishads, 193. 
 
 Science of Language, and Science 
 of Thought, 402. 
 
 Second century B. c., 314. 
 
 inference, Avita, not straight- 
 
 forward, 382. 
 Securus judicat orbis terrarum, Sar~ 
 
 valaukikapramatva, 423. 
 Seed must perish before the flower 
 
 can appear, 422. 
 Self, the, 277. 
 
 of God and man, the same, 
 
 194. 
 
 characteristics of the, 383. 
 
 does not begin with birth on 
 
 earth, 416. 
 Sensation without perception, 392, 
 
 393- 
 
 Senses, Indriyas* 415. 
 Soaha, name for Pata%ali, 314. 
 
 or posterior, 379. 
 Shashti-tantca, 228. 
 
 the Sixty-doctrine, 271. 
 
 Siddhanta, 203. 
 
 tenets, 385. 
 
 Siddhis, perfections, 350, 351, 357. 
 
 miraculous powers, 352-354. 
 Sign, Liriga, or Vyapya, 380. 
 
 bearer of a, Lingin, 380. 
 
 Slladitya Harshavardhana, com- 
 monly called Sri-Harsha of 
 Kanyakuhga, A. D. 610-650, 28. 
 
 Silalin, author of Nate-Sutras, 97. 
 Similarity, Samyam, 177. 
 Sita, daughter of Ganaka, zz. 
 Siva, found on earliest Mauryan 
 
 coins, 60. 
 
 Six systems of philosophy, 449. 
 Sixteen Topics, or Padarthas, 374. 
 
 Sixty-two systems of pMloropiijr, 
 
 Z7, 20. 
 
 Skambha, support, name given to 
 the one god, 47. 
 
 the universal support, on 
 
 meaning of Brahman, 70. 
 Skanda found on earliest Mauryan 
 
 coins. 60. 
 Sleep, state of dreamless, 174. 
 
 comes when Manas enters Pura- 
 
 tati s 384- 
 Smriti includes philosophy, 3. 
 
 reduced to writing, 93. 
 Smntis of the Sawkhya-yoga, ob- 
 
 ject ; pns to convergence of the 
 Vedanta passages on Brahman, 
 79- 
 
 philosophies of Gotama and 
 
 Kanada treated as, 80. 
 Souls, multiplicity of, 457. A 
 Sound, a quality, having Aka^a or 
 
 ether for its substance, 400. 
 
 eternal character of, 401. 
 Space, 444. 
 
 Sphofo, * the eternal word Brah- 
 man,' 65 n., 68, 402. 
 
 Vedanta on, 410. 
 
 Yoga and Samkhya on, 4za. 
 
 Nyaya on, 413. 
 
 Vaiseshika on, 414. 
 
 sound, distinct from the letters, 
 
 403- 
 
 Spho&yana, 402. 
 Sraddha, faith, 266. 
 iSrutam and Smn'tam, a. 
 
 or revelation, the only evidence 
 
 invoked by Badarayawa, 146. 
 
 and Apta-va&ana, difference be- 
 
 tween, 234. 
 
 inspiration, 347. 
 State religion in India, 25. 
 Statistics, to be used with caution, 
 
 45- 
 
 Stem and root, meaning of, 405. 
 
 Sthiti, 338. 
 
 Sthula- and Sukshma-sarira, 173, 
 271. 
 
 Subhashitas, 335. 
 
 Subject and object, as real or phe- 
 nomenal, 153. 
 
 identity of, 170. 
 
 Subjectivation, 283. 
 
 Substances, Dravya, 441. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 475 
 
 Subtk body, according to the Ve- 
 
 danta, 300. 
 Sukha, bliss, 266. 
 Sukshma-sarira, migrates after 
 
 death, 174. 
 
 subtle body, 300. 
 
 the Liriga-sarlra of the Sam- 
 
 khya-philorophy, 301. 
 Summum bonum, the Ni/zsreyasa of 
 
 Gotama, 370. 
 
 of the six systems, 370-373. 
 
 Sunya, not altogether nothing, 
 
 367- 
 S&nyavada, nihilism, 22, 366. 
 
 doctrine of emptiness, io 
 
 emptiness doctrine, 184. 
 
 nihilism, 386. 
 Suppiya, 16. 
 
 Supreme Being acting from com- 
 passion, 330. 
 Sutera, 269. 
 Sutre. style, 3, 203. 
 Sutra, a Buddhist, 440. 
 Sutra-vntti by Bodhayana, 187. 
 Sutras known to Buddhists, 15. 
 
 + heir style, 93. 
 
 now lost, known to Panini, 
 
 97- 
 
 ascribed to Bn'haspati, 97. 
 
 style of the, 218. 
 
 of Kapila, called Manana-sastra, 
 
 institute of reasoned truth, 
 289. 
 
 fables in the fourth chapter, 305, 
 
 306. 
 
 the philosophical, later than 
 
 Buddha, 314. 
 
 date of, 362. 
 
 Suttas (Sutras), name of part of 
 
 Buddhist Canon, 85. 
 Suvarna-Saptati-tfastra, the, 222. 
 Svabhasa, self-illuminated, 358. 
 livastikasa.ia, 349. 
 Svetaketu, 370. 
 Svetasvatara Upanishad, the three 
 
 Guwas found first in the, 216. 
 
 Upanishad, 262. 
 Syadvada 19, 22. 
 Syllogism, 427. 
 
 Systems of philosophy, the Six, ex- 
 isting during period from Bud- 
 dha, fifth century, to Asoka, 
 third century, 90, 91. 
 
 TAB EK AM, that One, the neuter 
 
 Supreme Being, 48. 
 Taigrasa, luminous, 249, 250, 260. 
 Taittiriya, author of the, 208. 
 Takakusu, Dr., 223* 
 Tamasalina, 269. 
 TanmatrteS, five, 250, 292, 346. 
 
 (this only), 291. 
 
 Tantra, cumulation of concurrent 
 
 rites, 202. 
 
 Tapas of the Hindus, 312. 
 Tarkm, old, 363. 
 
 refutation or reasoning, 388. 
 Tat tram asi, Thou art that, 122. 
 
 Thou art it ? 370. 
 
 Tattva-samasa, 274, 275, 306. 
 the, 242, 
 
 Tattvas, the twenty-five, 344, 274. 
 Technical terms in Upanishads, 5. 
 Tedarutikas, 240. 
 Tennyson, quoted, 156. 
 
 Ancient Sage, 194. 
 Terebinthos, pupil of ScyfchLmos, 
 
 name famed among followers 
 of Hani, 64. 
 Terminus minor. Paksha, 430 
 
 major, Vyapaka ? 430. 
 
 medius, Vyapya, 430. 
 
 Terms used in Hindu philosophy, 
 
 not the same as we use> 155. 
 Thlodicle, the Hindu, 171. 
 
 an ancient, 212. 
 Third place, the, 179. 
 
 Third Valli of K&th& Upanishad, 
 136. 
 
 Three couples of philosophical sys- 
 tems, 308. 
 
 Time, 444. 
 
 present, past, future, 393. 
 Titthiyas, or Tirthakas, 239. 
 Traigunya, 262. 
 Tranquillity (tfanti), 296. 
 
 Triad, Dharma, Art ha and Kama, 60. 
 
 of elements, 100. 
 TripUaka, date of, 15. 
 
 Trithen, Dr., andPrasthana Bheda, 
 
 75- 
 Truth better than sacrifice, 361. 
 
 Prama, 428. 
 
 Tryanuka, three double atoms, 446. 
 Tushtis and Siddhis, 270, 270 n. 
 Tvashfn, the maker, not real crea- 
 tor, of a) 1 things, 43, 44. 
 
476 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Two Brahmans, tbo word and the 
 non-word, 407. 
 
 UDDALAKA, 20. 
 
 Uddyotakara, not Udyotakara, 364, 
 
 365. 
 
 Udulomas, 22. 
 Universalia in re&us, 398. 
 Upada, a, material cause, 158. 
 Upadhi, condition, 430. 
 Upadhis, liirltirig conditions of 
 
 name and form, 158. 
 
 five, 163. 
 
 conditions, impositions, 163. 
 
 or conditions, 173. 
 
 conditions, 380, 436. 
 Upalabdhi, perception, 173, 418. 
 Upamana, comparison, 374, 394, 
 
 448. 
 
 belongs to the Nyaya school, 394. 
 Upanayana, 141. 
 Upanishad-period, 700 B. c., 4. 
 Upanishads, known to Buddhists, 
 
 24. 
 
 existence of, recognised in Bud- 
 
 dhist Canon, 85. 
 
 translation of, published 1879, 
 
 1884, 137. 
 
 character of the, 139. 
 
 contain the seeds of later philo- 
 
 sophy, 140. 
 
 and Vedanta, something between 
 
 the, 143. 
 
 Upasakas, laymen, 25. 
 Upavarsha, teacher of Panini, 117. 
 the Vedantist, 410. 
 Upayas, means of attaining Sama- 
 
 dhi, 344. 
 Uposhadha, 236. 
 Utpatti-vidhis,original injunctions, 
 
 200. 
 Uttarapaksha, 203, 435. 
 
 VADA, 389. 
 
 Vagapyayana, words, mean a genus, 
 
 ' 406. 
 
 Vaikarik*, 250, 252, 267. 
 Vaikhanasa-Sutras, Joss of; referred 
 
 to by Bhaskara/carya, 86. 
 Vairagya-sataka of Gainafcarya, 339. 
 Vaisali,Buddhist council at, 377 B.C. , 
 
 Vaiseshika, word not f-mnl in 
 Upanishads, 35. 
 
 on Spho/a, 414. 
 
 philosophy, 438. 
 Vaiseshikas, followers of Kanada, 
 
 3i- 
 
 creation and dissolution accord- 
 
 ing to, no. 
 Vaishnavas (Ramamgra), theory of, 
 
 contrasted with that of Brah- 
 
 mavadins, 82. 
 Vafc, direction taken in Veda by 
 
 thoughts connected with 
 
 speech, 65. 
 Vafcaspaf ' -Misra, on Buddhi, 247. 
 
 tenth century, 366. 
 Valkala, dress of bark, 27. 
 Vanaprasthas, 10, 27, 86. 
 Vanigr = Banian, 9. 
 Varaha-Mihira mentionsKapila and 
 
 Kanabhugr, 241. 
 Varna, colour and caste, 9. 
 Vasamas, impressions, 175, 320, 358. 
 Vasso, from Varshas, 237. 
 Vasubandha, knew the six Tirthya 
 
 philosophies, 363. 
 Vasunetra of the Vaiseshika school, 
 
 440, 
 Vasus, seven, can be distinguished, 
 
 38. 
 Vattagamani, 80 B. c., Tripi&ka 
 
 written, 4. 
 Vayus, winds, 267. 
 Veda, infallibility of the, in. 
 
 authority of, 149, 232. 
 
 meaning of, 149. 
 
 acquisition of the mere sound, 
 
 meritorious, 204. 
 
 superhuman origin of the, 206. 
 
 authority assigned by Kapila to 
 
 the, 232. 
 
 cannot prove the existence of a 
 
 Supreme Being, 332. 
 
 the word of Brahman, 395. 
 Vedadhyayana, learning the Veda 
 
 by heart, 141. 
 
 Vedanta, word does not occur in 
 old Upanisl; .ds, 84. 
 
 or Uttara-Mimamsa, 113. 
 
 the first growth of philosophical 
 
 thought, 115. 
 
 followers of the, called Aupani- 
 
 shadas, 116. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 477 
 
 Vedanta fundamental doctrines of 
 the, 121. 
 
 resume of the, 122. 
 
 philosophies, two, 192. 
 
 monism of, 216. . 
 
 first occurs in the Svetasvatara, 
 
 220. 
 
 and Samkhya, early relation be- 
 
 tween, 258. 
 
 Avidya, Aviveka, 280. 
 
 the, monistic, 281. 
 
 on Sphote, 410. 
 Vedanta-Sara, 215. 
 
 Vedanta- Sutras and Bfidarayana, 
 earlier than the Bhag~vad-gita, 
 
 113- 
 
 and Bhagavad-gita, relative age 
 
 of, 118. 
 
 methodical, 141. 
 
 Vedantins, followers of Upanishads, 
 
 31- 
 Ved ntist, a, does not really join 
 
 Brahman, 309. 
 Vedantists derive the unreal from 
 
 the real, 303. 
 Vedas, authority of the, 149. 
 
 sound of, eternal, 208. 
 
 words of the, supernatural, 208. 
 Vedic gods, three classes (i) of 
 
 the sky ; (2) of the mid-air ; 
 (3) of the earth, 37. 
 Vedic hymns, date for, 2000 B.C. or 
 5000 B.C., little gained by this, 
 
 34 
 Vedic VlUfc, a feminine, 56. 
 
 coincidence with Sophia of O.T., 
 
 57- 
 
 VedosdhyetavyaA, 205. 
 Verbal symbols, 165. 
 Vibhuti-pada, 334. 
 Vibhutis, powers, 349. 
 Videhas, bodyless, 342, 343. 
 Vidhatri, arranger, name given to 
 
 the one god, 47. 
 Vidvan-moda-tararigim, 212. 
 Vidyamatra, knowledge only, 160. 
 
 doctrine, 427. 
 
 Vigrflana Bhikshu, 285, 288, 451. 
 
 supposed to have composed the 
 
 Sutras, 221. 
 
 Vikaras, sixteen, 253, 283. 
 Vikasa, r higher enlightenment, 
 
 no, 
 
 Viniyoga-vidni, 200. 
 
 Virasana, 349. 
 
 Virtue, a preliminary of Moksha, 
 
 166. 
 Viruddha, arguments proving the 
 
 reverse, 389. 
 Visakha- found on earliest Mauryan 
 
 coin, 60. 
 
 Visesha, gross elements, 341 n., 447. 
 Vishamatvam, unevenness, m. 
 Vishaya, 204. 
 Vishnu, 313. 
 
 disguised as Buddha, 457. 
 Vishwi-Purana, 456. 
 Visishte-Advaita, Ramanugra's sys- 
 tem, 187. 
 
 Visva, or Vaisvanara, 260. 
 Visvakamma, later development of 
 
 Visvakarman, 45. 
 Visvakarman, described, vague and 
 
 uncertain character, 45. 
 
 maker of all things, adjective 
 
 showing germs that were to 
 grow into supreme deity, used 
 as substantive, 43. 
 Visve, or All-gods, represent first 
 attempt at comprehending the 
 various gods as forming a class, 
 
 39- 
 
 Vitanda, cavilling, 389. 
 Vivarta, turning away, 185. 
 Vivarta-vada, theory of illusion, 
 
 81. 
 
 Vivas vat, 307. 
 Vivekananda, 213. 
 Vividisha, desire of knowledge, 266. 
 Viyoga or Viveka, 310. 
 Vriha or Vn'dh-a, possibly Sanskrit 
 
 words, 55. 
 Vnshadeva received Sawkara ? 223. 
 
 king of Nepal, A. D. 630, 223. 
 Vyadi, words mean individual 
 
 things, 406. 
 Vyakta, 188. 
 Vyapaka, fire, 145. 
 
 what pervades, 429. 
 
 or Sfidhya, terminus major, 430. 
 Vyapta, pervaded, 429. 
 
 Vyapti, universal rule, pervasion, 
 
 429, 434- 
 
 a, may be true in ninety-nine 
 
 oa8es,yet not in the hundredth, 
 434- 
 
INDEX. 
 
 vyapti, threefold, 436. 
 Vyapya, what must be pervaded, 
 429. 
 
 terminus medius, 430. 
 
 Vyasa, identified with Badarayana, 
 
 "3- 
 
 lived at the end of the Bvapara 
 
 age, 113. 
 
 neyer named by Samkara as the 
 
 autfior of the Sutras, 112. 
 
 the father of Suka, 114. 
 
 called Parasarya, 117. 
 
 and Harihara, 256. 
 
 commentary on Yoga-Sutras, 313. 
 Vyashtf, 283. 
 
 Vyavaharartham, practical pur- 
 poses, 1 60. 
 
 Vyavaharika, phenomenal, 367. 
 
 WEBER, A., Professor, 56, 307 n. 
 
 Whole, is there a ? 393. 
 
 Women, present at philosophical 
 
 discussions, 10. 
 Wood-architecture, previous to 
 
 stonework, 61. 
 Word, the, as a creative power, 66. 
 
 or Sabda, 382, 399. 
 
 Words, meaning of, conventional i 
 
 394- 
 
 express the summum genus, 405. 
 
 not names of individuals, but of 
 
 classes, 408. 
 World, phenomenal reality of the, 
 
 154- 
 
 created by the Word, 397. 
 Worlds, the, created from the Word, 
 
 150- 
 
 Worship (UpasaniO, 164. 
 Writing, allusions to, 92. 
 
 Writing, when first attempt sd, in 
 
 India, 218. 
 Written letters called Unreal, 92. 
 
 YlfftfAVALKYA, xx, la, 340. 
 
 and kanaka, 13. 
 Ya&kafc, anybody, 254, 254 n. 
 Yama and Yami, usually identified 
 
 with Adam and Eve, children 
 of Tvashfri, but childless them- 
 selves, 44. 
 Yoga, quoted in Upanishads, 5, 84. 
 
 and Samkhya, the true philoso- 
 
 phies, 80. 
 
 not ration, 170. 
 
 in the Taittiriya and Katoa 
 
 Upanishads, 220. 
 
 and Samkhya, 307. 
 
 meanings of the word, 308. 
 
 is Samatva, equability, 308. 
 
 not union, but disunion, 30^. 
 
 means really Viyoga, 310. 
 
 steadying of the mind, 336. 
 
 as a Taraka, or ferry across the 
 
 world, 356. 
 
 is it Nihilism ? 359. 
 
 and Samkhya on Sphote, 412. 
 Yoga-Sutras, 334. 
 Yogafcaras, 22, 366. 
 
 Yogangas, helps to Yoga, 347, 348. 
 
 eight accessories of Yoga, 350. 
 Yoganusasanam, 317 n. 
 Yoga-sara-sawgraha, abstract of the 
 
 Yoga, 318. 
 Yogins in Mai tray. Up. VI, 220. 
 
 perceptions of the, 327. 
 
 nine classes of, 343. 
 
 ZARADES (Zoroaster), name found 
 among followers of Mani, 64. 
 
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