If you ever were a mother – well, no gender bias, it could as well apply to a father - you probably would better appreciate whatever I am going to discuss now. As a child grows, it goes through stages of gradual building up of its vocabulary. Most of what it says initially is gibberish and makes no sense at all. But does a mother ever complain? On the contrary she takes that with pride – her kid is at least attempting to say something. She finds meaning in those unintelligible words!
I get this very same feeling when I read about all those great thinkers of the yore who were trying to understand this world and came up with their own theories. It is not necessary that they have to be right. The fact that they have attempted is gratifying enough. Who was right, or who was not, makes no difference at all!. After all, they were all learning, and one day humanity would attain perfection. That is a mother’s hope.
So, when a Samkhya philosopher insists that this world emerged from an insentient primordial substance, I admire his attempt to address such fundamental issues. He gives emphasis on logic and reasoning which is quite appreciated. That is the way to go forward in most cases. Whether his conclusions were right, hardly matters. That he has attempted in a right direction, does.
Similarly, when the atomic theorists build their theory of the origin of the world based on how atoms combine with each other to form more complex structures, I am filled with amazement. They had no sophisticated gadgets that we have today. But still, they could think of something that is not even visible to naked eyes. Is it a small feat?
With all our sophisticated gadgetry, we are still grappling to understand the mind. But those Buddhists had developed an elaborate theory of how the mind works. Their ideas may look speculative, but they did show that their theory has applications. They could use their theory to modulate the mind and calm it down, which even our so called modern medical science is unable to achieve. We talk about mindfulness and what not. But we forget that we owe all that to those great Buddhist thinkers. So what if their theories were wrong?
Jain’s approach to looking at things really amazes me. Is it not the right way to look at things? No matter how sophisticated we are, the truth would always evade us. We have to be open to various possibilities instead of getting stuck with one view. Does it make us a bit too fickle? So what? Fickleness is some times better than rigidity which does not allow us to go forward besides fueling fanatism.
So, when I listen to a Guru who vociferously harps on one particular point of view, I keep wondering whether it is really necessary to be so dogmatic in what one believes in? While I admire the scholarly expositions of great Gurus like Sankara, I keep asking myself whether it was really necessary to decimate the opponents, the way Sankara often does in his commentaries. Could he not just focus on expounding his viewpoint and why he was right? Even if the views of Samkhyas, Vaisheshikas, Buddhists and Jains were all wrong, do they have any long-term adverse consequences in terms of how they affect humanity? I did not find Sankara or other Vedic scholars address this aspect. They merely push their views without saying why such forceful rejection of other views was really necessary.
If the claim is that it is needed to understand the truth, then why no two Gurus agree with each other on what they claim as truth. Sankara’s Advaita was rejected by his successors like Ramanuja and Madhva. Does that mean Sankara was wrong? Or as some modern Gurus claim, was Madhva or some later Guru, more right?
Probably, that is how we humans work 😉 We seem to have an innate urge to prove the opponent wrong before we say why we are right. Fine, that was just my personal comment on the debate that we discussed in the past several episodes.
Let us continue and see how Badarayana puts forth his theory.
A series on ancient Indian composition Brahma Sutra. © Dr. King, Swami Satyapriya 2020-21
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