Divine Self, Human Self

The Philosophy of Being in Two Gita Commentaries

Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781441140425
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Filosofia delle religioni

Winner of the Best Book in Hindu-Christian Studies Prize ( 2013/2014) from the Society for Hindu-Christian Studies. The Gita is a central text in Hindu traditions, and commentaries on it express a range of philosophical-theological positions. Two of the most significant commentaries are by Sankara, the founder of the Advaita or Non-Dualist system of Vedic thought and by Ramanuja, the founder of the Visistadvaita or Qualified Non-Dualist system. Their commentaries offer rich resources for the conceptualization and understanding of divine reality, the human self, being, the relationship between God and human, and the moral psychology of action and devotion. This book approaches their commentaries through a study of the interaction between the abstract atman (self) and the richer conception of the human person. While closely reading the Sanskrit commentaries, Ram-Prasad develops reconstructions of each philosophical-theological system, drawing relevant and illuminating comparisons with contemporary Christian theology and Western philosophy.

1

The Ground of Being/Non-Being, and the Divine Self: Śaṅkara on brahman and Kṛṣṇa

We will now inquire into the nature of brahman in Śaṅkara’s commentary. The critical hermeneutic point about his commentary is that he chose to do it all: Śaṅkara was perhaps the first to comment on the Gītā, and it is striking that he should have engaged with a text that could, if we go by his commentaries on the Brahmasūtras and (especially) the Bṛhadāraṇyaka and Chāndogya Upaniṣads, be at odds with his austere metaphysics. In those texts, he interprets the ancient identification of brahman and ātman as a fundamental absence of difference between the reflexive consciousness that is the core of ātman and the universally constitutive consciousness (cit) that is at least one – phenomenologically and gnoseologically significant – characterisation of ineffable brahman. His system, then, is to work out the way in which the multitudinous actuality of ordinary experience – the plural loci of consciousness that is humanity and all living creatures, and the physical diversity of the world that they inhabit – can be read in terms of this ultimate non-duality of an all-pervasive and all-constituting consciousness.

Śaṅkara does not give up this overarching metaphysics: we will return to the question of the plurality of beings and the physical presentation of the world in which beings find themselves. But the challenge that is posed to him in undertaking a commentary on the Gītā is the presence of Kṛṣṇa at the heart of the narrative. In simple terms, what is God doing here? And of course, those are simple terms indeed, for what ‘God’ means and how Kṛṣṇa is that ‘God’ are questions that can be answered only by going through Śaṅkara’s actual treatment of the Gītā. But the tension between a sweeping metaphysics and an inescapable theology is what provides the hermeneutic energy to his commentary; and furthermore, there is the intriguing fact that he chose to so comment, and indeed, render the Gītā one of the three sources (prasthānatrayī) of all subsequent Vedānta schools. There could, of course, be historical reasons for why he chose to do so, but I want to argue that, in any case, the result is a subtle and indirect account of God and reality that is not quite ontotheological and only in some respects a form of mystical ontologism. Given this, it would be unwise to start with a translation of ‘brahman’, any translation being already an interpretation; so, let the meanings accrete as we look at what he has to say about the nature of brahman.

Brahman in excess of being and non-being: On what there is and is not

On how things and being are non-existent (sensu strictu)

Śaṅkara first mentions brahman at the end of the long commentary on 2.16. This verse says: ‘For that which is non-existent (asat), no being (bhāva) is found; for that which is existent (sat), no non-being (abhāva) is found. But the core (antaḥ) of both of these has indeed been seen by the seers of reality.’¹ Śaṅkara leads up to talk of brahman through an exploration of the key terms in this verse. He starts by reading ‘being’ (bhāva) from the root word √bhu, as ‘coming into being’ (bhavanaṃ), as also ‘isness’ or ‘presence’ (astitā). This way, we get to the meaning of ‘the existent’ (sattā), derived from the root word √as from which is generated ‘is’ (asti) and thence, ‘isness’ (astitā). These grammatical moves, of course, indicate the start of his presentation of a radical metaphysics.

The existent – that which is – (sattā) is the universal category (sāmānya) of generic existence, derived in the Nyāya school in the centuries preceding Śaṅkara; it is what medieval Western thought calls the ens commune, the general fact that beings are. Śaṅkara’s claim is that for there to be such a general category of isness, is for any entity to be infused by being. So he clearly distinguishes between the isness of beings and being as such, that by which such isness is rendered. In that sense, from the beginning, it is clear that he is aware of the distinction between ontology – the classification of entities based on their isness – and being as such, that by which entities are beings. This is important when we come to what he has to say about Kṛṣṇa’s being and Kṛṣṇa as being as such.

Being – which can also be a coming into being, presence, and therefore, that which renders existence – is contrasted with non-being, i.e., those entities which may be called, ultimately, non-existent. But what he calls non-being is startling: for all things are non-being. But this is neither solipsism nor even idealism; for rather, Śaṅkara wants to attach a particular meaning to being, derived from his understanding of being as such. He says of all things present to us that they are changeful (vikāra), and whatever is changeful deviates (vyabhicarati) from what it appears to be to our awareness. This conclusion, he maintains, is available even through standard epistemological requirements. The means of knowledge (the pramāṇa system) like perception and inference, are expected to give us a grasp of what things really are. But such essence of existence (vastu sat) is never obtainable … for things constantly change. So epistemological standards direct us to an understanding of epistemic limits. The pot comes out and goes back to earth, and so all things and their material cause shift and change (for earth itself must have a further material cause, and it too shifts and changes in its presentation). So, he asks himself, does this imply nihilism? Could all be non-being (sarvābhāva)? No; it can always be understood that there are two apprehensions – the apprehension of existence, and the apprehension of non-existence. That regarding which apprehension does not deviate, exists; that regarding which apprehension deviates, does not exist. Thus, the distinction between existence and non-existence rests on the faculty of apprehension (buddhitantra); in all cases, there are two apprehensions.²

Śaṅkara goes on to draw out what these two apprehensions are. Objects (viṣayaḥ) of apprehension are changeful: in the cognition, ‘[this is a] blue lotus’, the ‘blue’ is a quality and ‘lotus’ the qualificand, and both change. In cognitions such as ‘the pot exists’, existence is not a quality of the pot, so that, while the pot may change, existence as such does not.³ The apprehension of being does not change in the way apprehension of objects does. Pots (ghaṭāḥ) and cloths (paṭāḥ) may come and go, and so our apprehension of them ceases when they do. ‘But apprehension of existence does not [cease] with the absence of objects’ (na tu sadbuddheḥ viṣayābhāvāt). He goes on to say: ‘Thus of the non-existent, the body and the binaries [such as heat and cold, etc.] together with their causes, it is said that there is no being. Then, the existent is the self, which is not non-being, for it is always non-deviating; this is what we say.’⁴ (We will, of course, return to self later in this chapter; and in even greater detail in the chapter on Self).

Śaṅkara here is not seeking to investigate the nature of objects, that is to say, how one distinguishes between different elements of the order of things, or how one uses epistemic instruments to determine the difference between water and mirage. Rather, he brackets the whole question of entities and their individual natures, and attempts to get to the very fact that there are things in all their diversity presented to and in our awareness. That being-there (as pots and bodies and coloured lotuses) of these things is existence itself, while the way they are is not-existence. Consciousness grasps both simultaneously, but to be ever-aware in consciousness of this duality – a strange and virtual duality to be sure – of being and non-being, is the attainment of the seers (darśinaḥ) of thatness (tattva). For them, the core (antaḥ) of the teaching is the certainty (nirṇayaḥ) that this is so. ‘That (tat) is the name of all, all is brahman; its name is “That” (tat). The manner of being (tadbhāvaḥ) of “that” is thatness, the as-it-is-hood (yāthātmyam) of brahman.’⁵ In this swift yet indirect way, Śaṅkara gets to brahman. Brahman is the way in which beings have their being. What renders being as it is, is brahman. We begin to understand that there is an intimate connection between brahman and being, given how Śaṅkara interprets being.⁶ But brahman’s connection is with non-being too; as we will see soon, for Śaṅkara, brahman is in excess of both being (that is to say, what is called Being in Christian and Heideggerian writing) and non-being (including the entitative nature of beings in the world). But before we turn to that, let us look a little more closely at the somewhat strange thought that the world as it is found in apprehension is non-existent, i.e., is non-being. We will see later that ontology itself is radically circumscribed for Śaṅkara, as there is nothing other than brahman. What is to be noted here is that he draws the line between being and non-being, not by way of subjective and objective states (where a metaphysical realist might say that the latter is being and an idealist that it is the former that is being), but by distinguishing between the changeful and the permanent.

For Śaṅkara, the changeful is perishable, mutation being the destruction of identity. Strictly speaking, every entity whose identity is given by changeable qualities is non-existent. Clearly, Śaṅkara is not talking of non-existence in the terms of an ontology. He is not stating that water is existent and a mirage not, or perception is real and its objects not. Rather, he is talking of ontology tout court. All things, being changeful, are non-being, while what is not changeful is being itself. In commenting on 15.16 – which is about selves – he returns to the strict construal of being as that which is imperishable. 15.16 talks of two groups of persons, the perishable and the imperishable, and goes on to say, ‘the perishable is all beings (kṣaraḥ sarvāṇi bhūtāni); the immutable (kūṭastha) is the imperishable’. Śaṅkara’s exegesis here ingeniously works in his distinction between being and non-being through the categories of the immutable and the changeful. ‘The immutable is a group that is [made up of] a heap, is stable as in a group. Or the heap is an illusion, a deception, crookedness, trickery, which are synonymous … it is called the imperishable because, due to the countless seeds of worldly existence, it does not perish.’⁷ Śaṅkara therefore limits existence, in the strict sense, to the constancy of being as such (‘Being’ – which I hesitate to use, for capitals carry their own implications in contrast to Sanskrit words, where they do not occur), in contrast to changeful beings, presented to themselves (as persons) or in apprehension as objects. The Heideggerian parallel is the distinction between ‘presencing’ and ‘presence’.⁸ Later we will see what Śaṅkara means when he says the immutable (the ‘presence’, as it were) is illusion.

Brahman in excess of being and non-being

So we see that the existent is being as such, not particular beings. Being is the thatness of all, not any particular thing amongst the all. But is thatness – the constancy of being as such – itself brahman? It is not easy to come to a simple conclusion about the metaphysical relationship between brahman and thatness. If, naturally, we take ‘That’ to be ‘Being’ (being as such, as opposed to the being (bhāva) of things and persons), we get the formulation that ‘Being’ is the name of brahman. But, having the option of equating brahman with Being, we have seen that, under 2.16, Śaṅkara chooses not to. Indeed, in the passage from 15.16 just quoted, he even equates the imperishable – the heap that as a whole is immutable – with the illusory. Later, we will see how he undercuts the metaphysics of what is not brahman, so that brahman is not other than what it is not. But first, we must look at another of Śaṅkara’s moves: brahman exceeds both being-as-such/the imperishable/the immutable/the existent/the unmanifest, as well as non-being/the perishable/the changeful/the non-existent/the manifest. Let us look at how, while distinguishing between being and non-being, Śaṅkara also talks of the excession (paramatva) of brahman.

Śaṅkara draws on the Gītā’s repeated use of the distinction between the unmanifest (avyakta) and the manifest (vyakta) and maps them on to the binary of being and non-being – being is the unmanifest, non-being is the manifest. This equation is not puzzling. Being as such is never individuated in awareness, never manifests itself, while what is manifest is always the particularity of beings. In that context, he notes 8.18’s statement that all manifest things emerge (prabhavanti) from the unmanifest at the break of cosmic day; this is the source of beings in this world, into which the multitude of beings (bhūtagrāmaḥ) dissolve (pralīyante) in the cosmic night. Then he points to the next verse: ‘But exceeding this is the other eternal, unmanifest state of being, unmanifest of the unmanifest; and that, when all beings are lost, is not destroyed.’⁹ Its exceeding the unmanifest he glosses as its being distinct (vyatiriktaḥ) and different (bhinnaḥ) from the unmanifest. This state of being (bhāvaḥ) is the imperishable (akṣara), brahman in excelsis (paraṃ brahman). The unmanifest state of being is the seed of the multitude of beings (bhūtagrāmabījabhūta). Brahman contains – or rather, is – the possibility of being, and therefore it is beyond both the unmanifest from which the manifest arises, and the manifest that does so arise. Śaṅkara recognises that it is necessary to both (i) indicate brahman’s exceeding being and non-being, and (ii) take being as such (or Being) to derive from it. Commenting on the chapter on the Vision of the Cosmic Form, he notes Arjuna’s saying of Kṛṣṇa in the midst of the theophanic event, at 11.37, ‘You are the imperishable, existent, non-existent, and what exceeds that’.¹⁰ On this, Śaṅkara says, the existent and the non-existent are merely a contingency (upādhi) of brahman, and therefore it comes to be referred to metaphorically (upacārāt) as existent/non-existent. In the ultimate sense, it exceeds existence/non-existence (paramārthastu sadasatoḥ paraṃ).

Even while offering a metaphysics – being and non-being, what count as one or the other, and why – Śaṅkara strives towards what may be called a transmetaphysics, an exhaustion of the limits of discursive understanding of our phenomenological being so that what lies...

Table of contents

• FC
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The Ground of Being/Non-Being, and the Divine Self: Śaṅkara on[italic] brahman[/italic] and Kṛṣṇa
• 2 Being and the God Other than Being: Rāmānuja on [italic]brahman[/italic] and Kṛṣṇa
• 3 A Comparative Study of Śaṅkara and Rāmānuja on Self and Person, Gnosis and Loving Devotion
• Endnotes
• Bibliography
• Index