Many of these shramanas, or “strivers,” as they were commonly known, lived alone in caves or in the forests; some stayed with their families in ascetic communities; more wandered from village to village, carrying only a change of clothes and a begging bowl for food (a pattern still very much in evidence in India today). The householders—those who did not leave their homes and places in society—were well-aware of these ascetics and wandering sages. They were common sights in the villages and towns, and often the householders sought them out for advice and lessons for living. So large and familiar was this countercultural movement that the shramanas were virtually regarded as a fifth caste, alongside the priests, the warriors, the producers, and the servants.
The relationship between these ascetics and the ordinary householders became symbiotic, since the holy men and women needed the support of the ordinary folk to make their quest for liberation possible. Supporting the ascetics and renouncers by giving them food, clothing, and shelter came to be seen as meritorious, as a way of gaining good karma necessary for better rebirth. The ordinary householder might help the shramanas now, in this life, knowing that in a future lifetime, others would help him in his effort to attain moksha. This emerging relationship between the shramanas and the householders established an important difference in the respective religious orientations of these two groups. The shramanas sought moksha in this lifetime. The householders—those who retained their roles in society, living a conventional life involving work and family—could not afford to devote their time and energies to the pursuit of moksha, so they chose to postpone that endeavor until a later lifetime when circumstances would favor it. In the meantime, the householder’s goal was to improve his rebirth through the accumulation of positive karma. So while liberation from samsara was the ultimate goal, not everyone sought it in this life.
This period in Indian religious history had an intensely experimental quality. Individuals often wandered from place to place, seeking this guru or that holy man, trying now one form of discipline and now another, adopting this doctrine and then that. Many of the practices we have come to associate with Indian religion were developed and refined at this time—disciplines such as meditation, asana yoga, and the countless varieties of self-denial and self-mortification, from fasting and celibacy to standing on one leg and lying on beds of nails. Teachers competed with one another for the allegiance of students and lay followers. Debates were held; conversations became heated; rivalries were common. Oftentimes, this competitiveness seemed to contain little of the spiritual or enlightened perspective in it, but the intensity and antagonistic energy of these times also pointed to the profound importance and urgency of the quest.
The lifestyles and beliefs of this fifth caste of ascetics varied widely, but they were united in their quest for relief from the acute sense of suffering implied by their understanding of samsara. They were united in another way as well: in the belief that the way to freedom lay in acquiring knowledge. Their renunciation of the world is perhaps best seen in this light, as a necessary course of action for removing the impediments that might prevent them from gaining the extraordinary understanding that would win moksha. The search for the knowledge that would lead to freedom was so important and so demanding that all worldly concerns had to be set aside.
Knowledge had always played an important role in Vedic religion. It was central to the success of Aryan rituals for the priests to know what needed to be done and spoken without error or misstep. Practitioners of Vedic rituals had to study for more than a dozen years to gain the understanding necessary to function as priests. So it is not surprising that knowledge was initially emphasized in this growing movement.
In the Axial Age, the quest for understanding took a different turn, urged on by the new goal of liberation from samsara. Shramanas sought more than the knowledge of ritual action and sacred words. Such learning could only be useful in acquiring worldly goods or a brief respite in heaven. Now the sages wanted to know the deep reality that was the basis of ritual practice—and the foundation for the whole of life.
This was different from the forms of knowing stressed in earlier manifestations of Indian religion. The Axial Age quest was for a knowledge that was comprehensive and fundamental. It was no longer enough simply to chant the correct mantras and perform the right ritual actions; the shramanas wanted to understand the whole of reality by knowing its deepest principles. The composer of the Mundaka Upanishad wonders, “What is that which, being known, illuminates everything else?”[4]
The desire to grasp reality’s elemental nature that we see in the Upanishads is not unlike the hope of modern physics to discover a unified field theory, which physicists sometimes call the Theory of Everything. For decades, physicists have worked to reconcile the four basic forces in the cosmos and understand them by a single mathematical formula, in essence reducing them to a singular principle. The goal of a unified field theory has been the Holy Grail for many physicists, who believe that finding it will unlock some of the deepest mysteries of the universe. In their own ways, the sages of the Upanishads and other axial thinkers were trying to develop their own Theory of Everything. They wanted to understand it all, not because they valued knowledge for knowledge’s sake, but because knowing the fundamental basis of existence, they believed, could bring genuine freedom and fulfillment. This was a knowledge that conferred liberation.
The knowledge sought by the north Indian shramanas was an extraordinary sort, to be gained by rigorous methods of asceticism and introspection and not merely transmitted by lectures or gained from reading books. The Sanskrit word for this form of knowledge is jñana, which is closely related to the Greek word gnōsis. Many will recognize gnōsis as the word for an esoteric understanding that was sought by some early Christians and others called, aptly enough, Gnostics. In the same way, the Indian shramanas pursued a supermundane kind of knowing, one that was in principle accessible to everyone but gained only by those willing to make the sacrifices required to get it. Despite the difficulty, and despite the costs—or perhaps because of them—many of these ascetic seekers claimed to have found what they were looking for: the way to final liberation, the answer to life’s deepest questions, the knowledge of the secrets of the universe itself.
Having now set out the basic existential predicament of Indian religion, we are in a position to begin our study of some answers proposed by these ancient shramanas. The religious excitement of the early Axial Age was marked by a wide variety of competing beliefs and practices, teachers, and schools of thought. Although we have no record of many of these teachings, we know a considerable amount about three of the most prominent. The first solution was known as the Vedanta, which was the view offered by the Upanishads themselves. Vedanta was so influential that it provided the principal theological foundation for the development of subsequent Hindu traditions. Other solutions were offered by two rival schools, Buddhism and Jainism. To appreciate the Buddhist and Jain perspectives, however, it is essential to understand Vedanta.
* * *
Katha Upanishad in Mascaró, trans. The Upanishads, 56–57.↵
Kulke, Hermann and Dietmar Rothermund, A History of India, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge), 49.↵
The Great Discourse to Saccaka in Bhikkhu Ñānamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi, trans. The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha: A New Translation of theMajjhima Nikaya, (Somerville, MA: Wisdom, 1995), 335.↵
Mundaka Upanishad in Mascaró, trans. The Upanishads, 75. ↵
8
The Vedantic Solution
The Upanishads were composed by sages seeking to unlock the deepest mysteries of existence. Essentially, they wanted to know two things: the nature of ultimate reality and the true nature of the self. Apprehending these, they believed, would confer the liberating knowledge that would halt the samsaric cycle and bring about a state of utter bliss.
The Upanishads thus take two seemingly opposite trajectories. One is in the direction of comprehending the universe in its greatest po
ssible sense, that is, in knowing the fundamental power or principle underlying the totality of all there is. The other direction is that of discovering what lies deep within the individual as his or her essence. The Upanishads have much to say about both lines of inquiry.
The Concept of the Self
An acerbic bumper sticker once admonished its readers, “Never forget that you are unique—just like everyone else!” Of course, we are all unique, but then there is nothing unique about being unique. We human beings do like to think we are special, whether as individuals or as a species. We want to believe there is something about us that sets us apart from everything else. In the book of Genesis, for instance, the god creates all the animals simply by calling them into existence, but when it comes to the human, he personally fashions a body made of dust and breathes into it the breath of life. God’s animating breath and particular attention differentiate humans from the other animals and make us special.
This example from Genesis is not unique, either. Almost all creation narratives reserve special treatment for humans. Other animals do not seem to be as obsessed with themselves as humans are. In fact, there are no other creatures that dwell so much on what they are and what they should be. For millennia, we human beings have wondered about ourselves and about what gives us life and determines our qualities. We have spent enormous amounts of intellectual energy trying to determine the essence of being human—what it is that makes us different from other beings and different from each other. Maybe that drive in itself is part of our essential natures: we are the animals who must interpret ourselves.
The vast majority of religions and philosophies over the past three thousand years have said the human essence is something more than our material bodies. They have given various names to this essence, such as “self,” “spirit,” “mind,” “heart,” and perhaps the most common, “soul.” There has rarely been much precision about what this essence actually is, but these terms and others like them are what religions and philosophies have used to indicate that aspect of being, whatever it might be, that animates and gives life to our bodies and signifies what we truly are.
The sages who composed the Upanishads used the word atman to designate the true human essence. Like the idea of karma, atman was an ancient Vedic term that was reinterpreted and redefined in the Axial Age. In the early Vedas, the atman was closely associated with breath. (The German verb meaning “to breathe” is atmen, spelled almost the same way as the Sanskrit.) The Vedic notion that the breath might be the human essence was based on the rather commonsensical view that since breathing stops at death, breath must be the animating force of life. But by the time the Upanishads had begun to be composed, the identification of atman with breath was unsatisfying to most thinkers. The breath was seen as too physical, too closely associated with the body. In one of the Upanishads, the great god Indra is even depicted as worried about this association. In response to a shramana who claims that body and self are identical, Indra reasons, “If our self, our atman, is the body, and is dressed in clothes of beauty when the body is, then when the body is blind, the atman is blind, and when the body is lame, the atman is lame; and when the body dies, the atman dies. I cannot find any joy in this doctrine.”[1] What the sages of the Upanishads sought as the human essence was something that transcends the body and survives death, an immortal substance. Part of the context of this passage, of course, was the increasing anxiety about the fate of the individual at death, one of the major themes of the axial transformation.
If not the body or the breath, what does constitute the human essence? What is the atman? Some contributors to the Upanishads suggested it was the mind.[2] The mind seems for many of us to be the center of our experience of the world, the seat of our personality. But almost all of the Upanishadic sages were reluctant to identify the human essence as synonymous with the mind. They asked: How can anything as capricious and as unsettled as the mind be our immortal self? One of the earlier Upanishads says, “It is not the mind that we should want to know; we should want to know the thinker.”[3] What was of greatest interest was not the content or the activity of the mind but what exists beneath or beyond it. Some of the sages concluded that what transcends the senses and the mind could not be sensed or thought about. From this insight, the Upanishads derived the unique qualities of the atman: it is imperceptible, beyond the categories of thinking, and beyond comprehension. Although the atman dwells within the body, it is different from the body and all its parts. Because it transmigrates from body to body through rebirth, the atman must also be immortal. The Chandogya Upanishad puts it this way: “Ātman, the spirit of vision, is never born and never dies. Before him there was nothing, and he is one for evermore. Never born, eternal, beyond times gone or times to come, he does not die when the body dies. If the slayer thinks that he kills and if the slain thinks that he dies, neither knows the ways of truth. The Eternal in humanity cannot kill; the Eternal in humanity cannot die.”[4] The atman does not come into being at a specifiable moment. It is not created; it simply always has been.
We might contrast this view with the position of many Western religions that have recently dealt with the question of the soul’s creation while struggling with the issue of abortion. Roman Catholicism contends that the soul is created at conception; some Protestant groups have said it starts fourteen days after conception; a Jewish tradition says forty days after conception for boys and ninety days after for girls; and Islam maintains that an angel breathes the life force into the fetus 120 days into pregnancy.[5] Though they disagree on the exact moment of ensoulment, the Abrahamic traditions are fundamentally together in saying the soul comes into being at a particular moment in time.
Although the Upanishadic thinkers are not of one accord in the specific details of their views on the human self, they all subscribe to a general understanding that distinguishes a higher self from a lower self. The lower, or phenomenal, self comprises the body, the senses, and the mind. These aspects are all transitory and mortal. The atman, or higher self, is distinguishable from these other elements by virtue of its eternal and spiritual nature. Confusing the higher with the lower self brings anguish to the human condition.
Brahman
Just as Indian thinkers sought to understand the nature of the true self, they also wanted to comprehend the ultimate reality, the fundamental power or principle supporting all there is. Like the quest for the atman, the sages’ pursuit of ultimate reality was founded on an idea from the Vedas, which was reinterpreted during the axial period. This particular notion was rooted in the Brahmins’ speculation about what made their rituals effective. As we recall from Chapter 5, the Vedas used a specific technical term to refer to the mysterious power that lies hidden inside of the ritual; they called that power brahman, and the priestly caste—the Brahmins—believed their principal function was to ensure its proper application.
In the Axial Age, the quest for liberating knowledge came to center on discovering the true nature of this brahman. The focus on brahman actually follows a very logical development in Indo-Aryan religion. The ritual and its sacred words had always been understood to correspond to greater cosmological and moral realities beyond the simple ceremony itself. The story of the sacrifice of the Purusha that we discussed in chapter 5 suggested that society, the various elements of the world, the ritual practices, and the Sanskrit language itself were all intrinsically and mystically connected to one another. Understanding the hidden brahman would therefore reveal the mystery of these connections and the deeper meaning of the whole of existence. By the Axial Age, brahman had come to mean more than the power of ritual; it now designated ultimate reality itself. To indicate this transformation of usage, we will use the term Brahman (capitalized) to refer to ultimate reality and brahman (lowercase) to denote the ritual power.
The authors of the Upanishads, however, did not reach complete consensus about the exact nature of Brahman. Yet there was at least one thing on which there seemed to be fundamental agreement:
throughout the Upanishads, we are told that Brahman is one—a singular, undifferentiated unity. There are no parts or divisions to Brahman. In various passages, Brahman is also credited with creating and sustaining the world and all life. It is sometimes called the ‘thread’ that strings together all creatures. Brahman is said to permeate all things but cannot be perceived. It embraces good and evil yet transcends both. It is beyond morality altogether. In short, Brahman encompasses the whole of reality yet surpasses it. There is nothing beyond the scope of Brahman.
The Age of the Sages Page 10
