The state of infinite formlessness only describes Brahman in His condition of rest (pralaya), and it does not follow from this that the enlightened sage, while living in this world, sees all the forms of life as a vain, empty illusion drifting like insubstantial smoke across the face of a void. Such world-denying philosophy does not represent the true meaning of Vedanta, for it is said in the Isa Upanishad:
In darkness are they who worship only the world, but in greater darkness they who worship the infinite alone. He who accepts both saves himself from death by knowledge of the former and attains immortality by the knowledge of the latter.
So much for the doctrine. We now have to see into the state of mind which underlies it, described in the Mandukya Upanishad as
that which is not conscious of the subjective, nor that which is conscious of the objective nor that which is conscious of both, nor that which is simple consciousness, nor that which is a mass all sentiency, nor that which is all darkness. It is unseen, transcendent, unapprehensible, uninferable, unthinkable, indescribable, the sole essence of the consciousness of self, the negative of all illusion, the ever peaceful, all bliss, the One Unit;—this indeed is atman [the Self], it should be known. [Trans. M. N. Dvivedi]
One has to be careful of these negative descriptions which so delight the Hindu mind and remember the Chinese saying that “between the All and the Void is only a difference of name.”5 For on the one hand the Upanishads say that Brahman is all, while on the other they apply the technique of “neti, neti”—“not this, not this”—to show that no individual thing is, as such, a sufficient description of Brahman. Therefore it cannot be said that the knowledge of Brahman is consciousness of the subjective, because this at once excludes consciousness of the objective and all other states of consciousness as well. In regard to these states Brahman is each and all, but none to the exclusion of others. In terms of psychology this is the complete acceptance of all possible states of mind and of all possible circumstances, for to say that all things are Brahman is another way of saying that all things are to be accepted—even nonacceptance, we must add if our nondualism is to be thorough.
Thus there is nothing man can do to attain union with Brahman, for whether his state of mind is vidya (enlightenment) or avidya (ignorance) it is nevertheless Brahman. Any attempt to gain that union by doing, by making changes, is egoistic pride, being man’s attempt to achieve by his own power what already is by the power of Brahman. Such pride, to use a popular phrase, is only man’s own funeral; it does not affect Brahman. In this very moment all men are Brahman in spite of and because of themselves, and by no possible means can they make or break that union; man can only become conscious of it, not as metaphysical truth but as spiritual freedom, by seeing his own nature as it is and relaxing that contraction (sankocha) of egoistic pride which will not let his nature be as it is, and which is forever trying to get away from it by making a virtue of acceptance. Deliverance (kaivalya) or freedom is not the result of any course of action, whether mental or physical or moral; according to Vedanta it comes only by Knowledge in the special sense of gnana (Gk. γνωδις) as the fruit of “meditation,” which is being rather than doing.6
The Hindu mind was ever in search of “that One thing, knowing which, we shall know all.” Obviously, knowledge in this sense is not just factual information; the phrase is another way of saying that the whole cannot be known by the sum of its parts. Thus to know all is not to know about everything, for, as Woodroffe explains, it is not an experience of the whole but the experience whole.7 This becomes clearer when we understand the reasons for which the experience was originally sought. Our ordinary, partial experience is always limited: joy is conditioned by sorrow, pleasure by pain, life by death, and knowledge by ignorance. Therefore the Hindus conceived freedom as an experience which had no conditioning opposite and called it union with Brahman, the “One-without-a-second.” For man is always bound so long as he depends for his happiness on a partial experience; joy must always give way to sorrow, otherwise it can never be known as joy. But the “experience whole” has no opposite; all the pairs of opposites exist in it, and therefore it may be described as the total acceptance of experience as we know it now, at this and at every moment. There is no greater freedom than the freedom to be what you are now. To this experience of freedom the doctrine of Brahman is a key for those who have the wits to use it, for the East does not give out its wisdom in plain statements for all and sundry to use or abuse as they please. It gives hints and makes everyone work hard to unravel their meaning on the principle of “cast not your pearls before swine.”
Early Buddhism
But inevitably there came a time when the experience was obscured by the doctrine, when the psychology of religion became the philosophy of religion and the Brahmanic tradition degenerated into scholasticism, ceremonialism, and fantastic extremes of asceticism whose object was not to accept the opposites but to destroy them, so negatively was the doctrine interpreted. In the depths of this degeneration there appeared in India one Gautama Siddhartha, a prince of the Sakya clan, afterward known as the Buddha, which is perhaps the most tremendous title that a son of India could be given. According to the tradition, Buddhas arise in the human race about once in every five thousand years at times when the “True Law” is forgotten among men. The word “Buddha” is derived from the root budh—“to know,” and a Buddha is thus one who is supremely enlightened or awakened, one who has plumbed the uttermost mysteries of the universe and attained all knowledge, one who, out of his time, has reached the full height of human evolution. No one can tell whether Gautama was actually such a being, for the imaginative mind of the Orient has undoubtedly added much legend to fact, and it cannot be said that such a giddy height of attainment is the immediate object of subsequent Buddhist thought and practice. As we shall see, in China at least the word “Buddha” has been understood in a more immediately practical sense, although the deepest reverence is still accorded to the supreme Buddhas, to Gautama, Amitabha, and the various Dhyani Buddhas of Mahayanist theology.
Although we have in writing a prodigious number of words attributed to the Buddha, little is known of him. For a long time after his death (circa 550 BC) his words were passed from mouth to mouth and learned by rote—hence their tabulated mnemonic form—and when they were finally set down in writing their style bore little relation to the spoken words of any human being that ever lived. The earliest records of his teaching are found in the Pali Canon, three large groups of scriptures which read, for a great part, like a statistical report compiled on wet afternoons by monks who had nothing better to do. Another considerable section (the Vinaya) contains the very elaborate system of rules and regulations for the conduct of the monastic order (sangha), most of which were probably invented in later times and ascribed to the Buddha to give them the necessary sanction. Again they are obviously the work of those whose time was so slightly filled that they could devote hours and hours to the invention of pettifogging restrictions. As for the sections on psychology, never were there such ponderous lists of minutiae, the apparent aim of which is to analyze the human being down to the last detail and so prove that he does not really exist. One has every sympathy with the Chinese Buddhist master who described these records as “lists of ghosts and sheets of paper fit only to wipe the dirt from your skin.” The actual, positive teaching has the same tendency to repetitiveness and decomposition, having the general aspect of a flat, barren plain without any definite mountains or valleys; it just goes on and on. It seems nothing less than a miracle that a great world religion can have grown on such a foundation, but I do not think it did.