In the previous episode we saw how science adopts a monistic view of the world and reduces everything into mere objects. And that ‘everything’ includes each one of us. Science is also so paranoid about subjectivity that it emphasizes on objectivity and looks down on all subjective aspects of us.
On the other hand, many of us, either by training or by intuition believe that we are not just the body, but we also have a soul that gives us the subjective experiences.
It was probably the ancient Samkhya philosophers of India who first formalized this dualistic view of the world around us. Samkhya talked about sentient and insentient, subjective and objective, matter and soul, as two different distinct categories that exist in this world. This is unlike science, which talks about only objective entities and explains everything else as an appearance of the objective matter.
The Samkhya has its own strong argument to posit this duality. If everything were just an object, then for whose sake these objects exist? The Objects by themselves are insentient and they can in no way use other objects. There has to be some subject which is not an object, for whose sake all the objects exist. That is Samkhya’s view.
Samkhya calls the objective world as Prakriti and the subjective entities as Purusha. We can roughly translate these two as matter and soul. Prakriti is insentient, undergoes changes, proliferates by multiplying itself. In contrast, Purusha is sentient, does not undergo any changes and does not reproduce in any way. Since the Purusha does not undergo any changes, it can be termed as eternal. Though even the Prakriti is also eternal, but since it undergoes changes, we can see it as transient.
Coming to our own self, our body is made of matter or Prakriti, and the ‘I’ residing in this body is the soul or Purusha. Since the body undergoes changes, it finally disintegrates itself, which we call as death of the body. But death is only a transformation from one form to another form of matter. But the soul does not undergo any changes and it migrates from one body to another body which is called re-incarnation.
Why do these two kinds of things – body and the soul – exist? What is the purpose? Samkhya says that the body provides means to enable the soul to interact and enjoy the world. It is through the sense and motor organs that the body supports. But this interaction with the world is going to cause not only pleasure but also pain to the soul. Pleasure and pain are also part of this dualistic nature of the world.
The pleasure encourages the soul to further indulge into more pleasures and the pain makes the soul suffer. This could be an endless chain of pleasure and pain since they follow each other. How does the soul come out of this duality of experiences?
Samkhya says that when the soul understands its true nature – that it is not the body, it frees itself from all duality of experiences. And it is the very same body that helps the soul in freeing itself. How does it help?
Samkhya does not say much about how exactly this freedom comes through, but its companion school namely the Yoga, has elaborate means to achieve that end. Yoga proposes meditation as the means to attain the freedom from pleasure and pain induced by the body.
How does the soul interface with the body to interact with the world either to experience pleasure or pain? Though at the periphery there are the sense and motor organs, ultimately it is through the mind that the soul imbibes the experiences.
Mind is part of body and by calming down the mind completely, the soul comes out of its clutches. That is why Patanjali says “Yogah citta vritti nirodhah” – Yoga is nothing but restrainment of the mind. When the mind does not influence the soul, the soul automatically frees itself and reverts back to its ever-blissful state. It becomes free from the duality of the world – matter and soul – and enters Kaivalya.
Buddha who came after the Samkhyas, never categorically denied the existence of the soul. But he urged his disciples not to get into debates on the existence of the soul, nor what this soul is all about. He felt that, that would agitate their mind and derail them from their spiritual path. But Buddhists understood it as Buddha denying the existence of the soul. And they adopted ‘anatta – no soul‘ as the prime concept of Buddha’s teaching. They focused on mind and came up with elaborate theories about the mind.
Buddhists also believed in a dualistic world like the Samkhya except that there was no place for soul in Buddhist way of thinking. All that they had was body and mind. Body was material aspect of existence and mind was something non material and belonging to a different category. They too focused on quietening the mind through the process of meditation.
Buddhists said that pleasure and pain were produced in the mind, but there was none who experienced them. These only ended up changing the states of the mind. Early Buddhist meditative practices aimed at developing apathy to the changes in the mind. They developed elaborate theories about the working of the mind. They also spelt out how active participation in the pleasure and pain resulted in Karmic bonds that finally resulted in re-incarnation after the death of the body.
Strangely, Buddhists had a parallel theory of rebirth or re-incarnation, which was not based on the concept of an eternal soul that migrated from one body to another! The main aim of Buddhist meditative practices was to break the endless cycles of births and re-births. Why they had such a goal is beyond my comprehension since according to them there is none who undergoes suffering nor takes rebirth. It is all just some phenomenon! Why bother about it? 😉
Like all people in the world, the main stream people in India also held a dualistic view of the world – ‘myself’ as identified by the body, and the God! Whole lot of religious practices were followed, trying to appease the God to overcome the hurdles in life and to attain worldly pleasures.
The God had no place in the Samkhya view of the world. They felt that the entire world can be explained without taking recourse to concept of any God. Even the Buddhists rejected the concept of a creator God though later Buddhists adopted worshipping of various deities, just like the main stream lay people.
So, unlike the modern scientists, these ancient people were strictly dualists where the word dual meant multiple and ‘not one’. It could be either the matter and soul concepts of the Samkhyas or the body and mind concept of the early Buddhists, or the myself and God of the mainstream lay people.
Common man never bothers about theories. He depends more on emotions and beliefs. But the likes of Buddhists continued with their quest to further refine their theory of body and mind duality. That led to many interesting things. Let us discuss that in the next episode.
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