In many faith-based religions, this question does not arise at all. It could even be a forbidden question to ask. It is sacrilegious to question the existence of God.
Acceptance of God is the most basic prerequisite. There is no religion if there is no God. But not so in ancient India. India had a completely open system where anyone was free to question anything including God.
There were Meemamsakas who firmly believed in Vedic rituals. They said that talking about God was a useless pursuit. These are the people who championed a ritualist form of the religion. What are these rituals for? Not to appease some God, but to get some worldly benefits or at least to attain heavenly abode after death. They said that anything which does not end up with some palpable result is of no consequence. They ridiculed the Upanishads as idle talk, though these Upanishads were also part of the same Vedas.
Upanishads focused mainly on Brahma or God. Meemamsakas’ view was that irrespective of whether God exists or not, a given ritual produces the promised results. So, it is action that is more important and not some hallowed concepts.
And we had the atomic theorists called Vaisheshikas. They said that this world came into existence as a result of combining of various atoms. Whether God exists or not, he is not the one who created this world. He might have been a witness or even a supervisor, but God did not create this world. So why bother to know about him?
Even the Samkhya philosophers who relied upon logic to know everything, said that the concept of God is not needed to explain this world. They attributed the existence of the world to insentient primordial substance called Pradhana. This Pradhana transformed itself into various entities almost on its own. These entities together with sentient souls is all that we see around us. In that case, why do we need the concept of God?
The Yogis who closely followed on the footsteps of the Samkhya are partly here and partly there. They said that the God did not create this world but he could have been the overseer of the entire creation. They believed that whatever Yoga can achieve can also be achieved by surrendering to this God.
The likes of Buddhists admitted no God. They neither believed in the existence of any sentient entity called soul. Their world was limited to a sequence of bodies and minds. They said that the spontaneous appearance and disappearance of sequence of bodies and minds created the illusion of a sentient being. But in reality, there is no sentient being anywhere. All that exists is only body and mind. Some among them even went to extent of denying the existence of body itself! They said the visible world is something that is imagined by the mind, and in reality, no world exists! There are other Buddhists who said that the world emerged from ‘nothing‘ and none created it. Naturally, God had no place in their way of thinking.
India also had philosophers called Charvakas who were ultra-materialists. They considered body and mind as the ultimate. In their view, it is the active mind that appears to be a sentient self. There is no separate entity called soul. They said that nothing that is not evident to the senses exists. So, there is no God.
So, all these people directly or indirectly denied the existence of God. Or at least they said that God is immaterial.
In contrast to all these views, Upanishads focus mainly on God or Brahma. They say that God is as evident as one’s individual self. Everyone experiences his own existence as an individual. What that self is, is something that needs to be understood clearly. By understanding that self, the Upanishads say, one attains eternal peace. This peace is beyond all material achievements.
Sage Badarayana tries to make this message of the Upanishads clear through his composition Brahma Sutra. He cites various Upanishadic sentences to drive home his point. In a way, his work is a garland of flowers taken from the garden of Upanishads as Sankara puts it in a highly poetic way.
But Badarayana does not just quote Upanishads, but uses logic to make his point clear. If he were to just quote from Upanishads without logically putting forth his views, he would not have been anyway different from others who also quoted from their respective scriptures. That would be no debate at all.
Each one sticking to their views does not amount to convincing the opponent. They have to logically explain their views. Show the merits of their arguments and bring out the weaknesses in the arguments of the opponents. This is what makes the Brahma Sutra interesting. It is not a one-sided view of the proponent. But a view which Badarayana tries to establish using sound logic and evidence.
There are a couple of things here. If we believe Badarayana to be Vyasa, the composer of Mahabharata, we come across some inconsistencies. Vyasa is believed to be belonging to a pre- Buddhist era. How can he take on Buddhists who postdated him?
Actually, Badarayana never explicitly addressed any Buddhists. It was later commentators like Sankara who assumed Buddhists and the like as the opponents, since Sankara was post Buddhist. The basic debate was between a set of ideologues and not specific sects of people. So, when Sankara keeps referring to various sects of Buddhists as the opponents, we should understand that Sankara was referring to people who existed in his life time or who predated him. He was only referring to some ideology which he felt was not right. He was only presupposing what Badarayana might have had in his mind.
Badarayana calls his discourse as Brahma Jijnyasa, or enquiry about Brahma. The word Jijnyasa means a desire to know. So, his very first Sutra is
“AThaathO Brahma jijnyaasaa”
-- And now let us know about the Brahma – Brahma Sutra 1.1
In the next episode, let us see how Badarayana puts forth his views.
A series on ancient Indian composition Brahma Sutra. © Dr. King, Swami Satyapriya 2020-21
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