Page Text
________________
Sankara and the Upanişads
431
and were never actuated by any desire of knowing the absolute truth, but the Upanisads, which were intended for the wise who had controlled their senses and become disinclined to all earthly joys, demonstrated the one Absolute, Unchangeable, Brahman as the only Truth of the universe. The two parts of the Vedas were intended for two classes of persons. Sankara thus did not begin by formulating a philosophy of his own by logical and psychological analysis, induction, and deduction. He tried to show by textual comparison of the different Upanişads, and by reference to the content of passages in the Upanişads, that they were concerned in demonstrating the nature of Brahman (as he understood it) as their ultimate end. He had thus to show that the uncontradicted testimony of all the Upanisads was in favour of the view which he held. He had to explain all doubtful and apparently conflicting texts, and also to show that none of the texts referred to the doctrines of mahat, prakrti, etc. of the Sāmkhya. He had also to interpret the few scattered ideas about physics, cosmology, eschatology, etc. that are found in the Upanişads consistently with the Brahman philosophy. In order to show that the philosophy of the Upanişads as he expounded it was a consistent system, he had to remove all the objections that his opponents could make regarding the Brahman philosophy, to criticize the philosophies of all other schools, to prove them to be self-contradictory, and to show that any interpretation of the Upanişads, other than that which he gave, was inconsistent and wrong. This he did not only in his bhāsya on the Brahina-sútras but also in his commentaries on the Upanişads. Logic with him had a subordinate place, as its main value for us was the aid which it lent to consistent interpretations of the purport of the Upanişad texts, and to persuading the mind to accept the uncontradicted testimony of the Upanisads as the absolute truth. His disciples followed him in all, and moreover showed in great detail that the Brahman philosophy was never contradicted either in perceptual experience or in rational thought, and that all the realistic categories which Nyāya and other systems had put forth were self-contradictory and erroneous. They also supplemented his philosophy by constructing a Vedānta epistemology, and by rethinking elaborately the relation of the māyā, the Brahman, and the world of appearance and other relevant topics. Many problems of great philosophical interest which
| SR No. | 007593 |
| Book Title | History of Indian Philosophy |
| Original Sutra Author | N/A |
| Author | Surendranath Dasgupta |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
| Publication Year | 1922 |
| Total Pages | 2517 |
| Language | English |
| Classification | Book_English |
| File Size | 125 MB |