________________
K. C. BHATTACHARYYA
651
publication of his collected works that I found that my opinion was substantially in accord with Bhattacharyya's own final opinion. In his last work, Studies in Yoga Philosophy, lectures delivered in 1937, four years after the Presidential Address and one year after “The Concept of Philosophy," but not published in his lifetime, he called the absolutes knowledge, will, and bhakti (1 305, cf. 289). Bhakti means love in the religious sense of love of God. Now, keeping within the context of Hinduism, he assigned the absolutes respectively to Vedanta, Yoga, and Vaishnavism. Vaishnavism is a religion which in its theology and soteriology, and even its Christology and Mariology if these terms can be extended to their Hindu analogues, has much in common with Christianity. But whether we seek the absolutes in non-dualism, Yoga, and Vaishnavism or with a wider perspective in Vedanta, Buddhism, and Christianity, the three religions are alternative, incapable of refuting each other and incapable of accepting each other in any synthesis.
The Absolute is ineffable, 92 "an entity that cannot be understood as it is believed, and is speakable only by way of symbolism" (II 116). Perhaps it can be experienced in "supra-reflective" consciousness, but it can be understood only negatively as not being what it is not. In neo-Vedanta it is understood as the limit of the process by which experience is purged of the qualifications which make it relative. As there are three such processes, there are three limits, but none can be comprehended by thought or reflection. Absolute Truth, knowing the thing in itself without the subjective categories which give it meaning, can be understood only negatively and spoken only symbolically (II 116). Absolute Freedom, willing without any willed object, is equally meaningless, since what is meant is object. Absolute "Love, feeling of subject and object as one though not identical, is the unitive experience of mysticism. The Absolute is incompre
ing mirror; no such thing has ever been." The former presented the soul as a mirror passively reflecting, and ideally perfectly reflecting, objective Truth; the latter denied that there is any substantial soul underlying the free process of consciousness, and this became orthodox Zen. If the ideal of Truth, the mirror, was denied, it was denied not in the name of Truth but in the name of an alternative absolute.
91 Obviously meaning non-dualism; other schools of Vedanta are associated with Vaishnavism.
92 I retract my statement in "Contemporary Vedanta Philosophy" (Rev. of Met. 9 [1955-56), 492) that "he has no place in his theory of knowledge for the ineffable, taking the plausible position that everything we speak is speakable." Ineffable properly means "speakable, but symbolically, not literally."
