In the previous episode, we were talking about how the great philosopher Sankara came up with his theory of illusion or Maya in the process of explaining how the single Atma that alone exists ‘appears’ as many things.
But the Upanishads rarely talk about any personified God. They mostly talk about the abstract entity called Atma which they claim ‘became’ many and not ‘created many’ as personified God proponents would like to believe. If that is the case, let us first see how the Upanishads talk about this process of ‘one becoming many’ a bit more in detail.
This process is described in slightly different ways in more than one Upanishad. But let us stick to the story that we were discussing in the previous episode, namely the story from Chandogya Upanishad.
This Upanishad describes the emergence of this world as follows.
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In the beginning there was none other than the Atma itself. There was no world, no beings, no nothing, except this Atma.
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And this Atma thought “let me be many and multiply as many things”.
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This Atma took the form of three basic elements.
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These three basic elements combined with each other in various proportions to form the material world.
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But these material entities are insentient. They can’t think, they can’t feel, nor do they have a free will of their own. Basically, they are inert.
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Atma thought “let me give life to these inert forms”. So, it took multiple sentient forms called “Jeevatma”. And these sentient forms, that we call as ‘souls’ in common parlance, entered the bodies formed out of insentient material things giving life to them.
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And the proliferation of the world continued as infinitely many forms, each with a specific name and character.
This is how the Upanishad describes the process of coming up of the world as we know of. The entire process looks quite mind boggling and beyond our mundane logic. How can something become many things simultaneously and still remain outside of them, as if? That is not something that we can understand using our worldly reasoning. I will come to that later and explain how that is possible.
At the moment, let us observe that in this entire process there is no hint of any illusory happening as Sankara and his followers claim. The narrative does talk of multiplicity. It is just that this multiplicity ultimately boils down to a single entity since each of these myriad forms are nothing but the forms taken by the Atma itself. So, that way, each one of them is none other than the Atma itself. That is what Uddalaka means when he says that
“whatever that pervades this entire world, whatever makes this world alive, is in reality nothing but the Atma. And even you are that Atma”
Why should Sankara have any objection to this simple and straight forward interpretation of the words of the Upanishads? Why does he haggle to create new ideas of illusion or Maya? Why should he even disown the Upanishads as part of the illusion?
Before we answer this question, let us see what the primary opponents of Sankara said about the creation of the world.
Sankara considered the Samkhya philosophers as his main opponents. He fought tooth and nail to dismiss their views and discard them as rubbish. Who were these Samkhya?
Samkhya were one of the most ancient philosophers of India who believed that everything about the world can be logically arrived at. They even said that the concept of God is unnecessary to explain the world. They had their own theory about how the world emerged. And they claimed that even the Upanishads support their theory.
What was their theory?
The Samkhya said that in the ‘very beginning’ there was this primordial substance called Pradhana and infinitely many sentient souls. This primordial substance was not really a substance but an equilibrium state reached by three opposing ‘tendencies’ namely Satwa, Rajas, and Tamas. In crude terms, these three can be viewed as tendency to illuminate, tendency to induce action, and tendency to cause perpetual inertia.
The Samkhya said that for some reason this equilibrium state reached between these three tendencies was disturbed. That resulted in proliferation of infinitely many material things that are nothing but combination of these three tendencies in various proportions. Samkhya clubbed all of them together as Prakriti or matter. These material things are inert and insentient.
The souls which have always been around got associated with bodies formed by these material things of Prakriti and that gave rise to the world we see around us. Nowhere there was any ‘superbeing’ called God which had any role to play. Entire thing happened purely within the framework of causality.
Samkhya even put forth an elaborate theory of how this entire ‘creation’ took place. They even claimed that their theory can be logically arrived at by simple observation of the world that we see around. According to Samkhya, the Upanishadic ‘creation’ story that we talked about earlier, is just talking about that.
Yes, there are lot of similarities between what the Samkhya says and what is described in the Upanishads. In that case, why should a staunch supporter of Upanishads like Sankara have any objection to what the Samkhya says? Why should he oppose them and consider them as his primary opponents? Why should he invent the concept of illusion which is not called for in the said story?
That is an interesting question. I will try to answer this question in my own way in the next episode.
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