Outlines of Indian Philosophy

Author(s): Paul Deussen
Publisher: Crest Publishing House

Page 48

1
PREFATORY REMARKS
and of hundred Vedântins (I have it from a well informed man, who is himself a zealous adversary of Çarkara and follower of Râmânuja) fifteen perhaps adhere Râmânuja, five to Mâdhva, five to Vallabha, and seventy-five to Çarkarâchârya.
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This fact may be for poor India in so many misfortunes a great consolation; for the eternal interests are higher than the temporary ones; and the System of the Vedânta, as founded on the Upanishads and Vedânta Sûtras and accomplished by Çankara's commentaries on them, equal in rank to Plato and Kant is one of the most valuable products of the genius of mankind in his researches of the eternal truth, as I propose to show now by a short sketch of Çankara's Advaita and by comparing its principal doctrines with the best that occidental philosophy has produced till now.
Taking the Upanishads, as Çankara does, for revealed truth with absolute authority, it was not an easy task to build out of their materials a consistent philosophical system, for the Upanishads are in Theology, Kosmology and Psychology full of the hardest contradictions. So in many passages the nature of Brahman is painted in various and luxuriant colours, and again we read, that the nature of Brahman is quite unattainable to human words, to human understanding; so we meet sometimes long reports explaining how the world has been created by Brahman, and again we are told, that there is no world besides