Samayasara

Author(s): Kundkundacharya, Hiralal Jain, A N Upadhye
Publisher: Bharatiya Gyanpith

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SAMAYASĀRA
marks but the refuge of the defeated intellect sustained more by personal mysticism than by logical necessity. Champions of such a philosophy of the type of Deussen always make the mistake of believing that any other form of philosophy will be incompatible with the highest aspirations of religious and moral culture. In short, they think that the only alternative to such an effective idealis:n is an inpossible materialism. It is because of this assumptiou that they try to escape into soine forın of idealism. The birth of idealisin is very often due to such intellectual confusion. In order to safeguard the eternal values of life from the alleged menace of materialism some thinkers propound the doctrine of idealistic metaphysics which ultimately results in nullifying the very eternal values. It ends in repudiiting the distinction between truth and error, good and evil and beauty and ugliness. Let us go back to Deussen. 'He makes the astounding proposition that the true religious philosophy must have as its background soinething of the Kantian transcendentalis.11. He says in so muy words that the value of a religion consists in its allegiance to a philosophy to which the concrete world is an illusion or māyā and life is but a mockery. There may be some kind of . religious satisfaction resting on such a metaphysics. But we doubt very mych if the Upanişadic religion is of much value only because of this attitude. Again he seems to think that modern Christianity has its value because of its metaphysical idealism which he assumnes to be its foundation. We are quite sceptical about this. Neither the founder of Christianity nor his followers ever believed that the concrete world of reality is but an illusion or an appearance. We rather think that the success and popularity of Christian religion are entirely due to its grasp of concrete life and its emphasis upon the value of human personality. Take away these, it would cease to have any value and with that perhaps it would cease to be a religion. We can only look with dismay when Deussen connects modern Christianity with Kantian idealism. His congratulations on Upanişadic thought because of its similarity to Kantian Idealisın we are rather prone to decline because his attitude is corroborated neither by historical development nor by philosophical evidence of later thought in India.
The Chando gya Upanişad.--The Upanişad belongs to the Sāma Veda as evidenced by "Chandas." It is one of the oldest Upanişads and is divided into eight parts of varying lengths. The first two are related to rituals which go to show that this Upanişad was once a Brāhmaṇa treatise dealing with ritualistic procedure. The really Upanişaclic or philosophic portion is very interesting mainly in the form of dialogues reminding one of Platonic dialogues. This Upanişad may be taken as a typical of the Upanişads in general. Some of the important characteristics of the Upanisadic thought are found here. The fundamental concept of the Upanişad