The Brahma Sutra · Book 1: Convergence · Pada 4 · Refuting Samkhya, and Brahman as both causes

The Katha’s ladder, 1.3.10 to 1.3.11, climbs like this: “Beyond the senses are the objects, beyond the objects the mind, beyond the mind the intellect, beyond the intellect the great self, beyond the great the unmanifest, beyond the unmanifest the Person; beyond the Person there is nothing, that is the goal, the highest road.” The Samkhya reads his own system there and says so: here are our great principle (mahat), our unmanifest (avyakta, the pradhana) and our Person (purusha), under our names and in our order; the pradhana is well called unmanifest, having no sound or touch or form; so scripture does vouch for it after all, Kapila and the other great rishis built on the Veda, and everything settled since 1.1.5 is open again. Shankara’s reply runs through seven sutras. 1.4.1: the word avyakta here names what was left over from the simile of the body a few verses earlier (1.3.3 to 1.3.4): “Know the self as the lord of the chariot, the body as the chariot, the intellect the charioteer, the mind the reins; the senses, they say, are the horses, the objects their roads.” The ladder picks up the simile’s pieces under the same names, senses, objects, mind, intellect, the self (the chariot’s lord, called great because it is the master; or else the intellect of Hiranyagarbha, the first-born, in which all intellects rest), and crowns them with the Person, the highest place of Vishnu that the simile had promised as the journey’s end. One piece of the simile has gone unnamed: the chariot, the body. Avyakta is the body.

Standing in the same slot proves nothing about what a thing is; only a fool takes a cow for a horse because it is tied where the horse usually stands. 1.4.2: how can a gross, visible body be called unmanifest? Because the subtle is meant: the fine elements, the seed-matter from which the body is formed, and a cause’s name passes to its effect, as “mix the Soma with cows” means with milk; the Brihadaranyaka itself says of this world, “all this was then unmanifest” (1.4.7), meaning the world before names and forms came out. 1.4.3: the Samkhya pounces: a seed-state of the world before names and forms is exactly our pradhana. The answer: a seed-state there must be, since without a power to act the Lord could not create, and since the freed would otherwise be drawn back into birth; that power is burned up by knowledge; it is avidya by nature, maya, the great sleep in which the souls lie, called akasha in one text, akshara in another, maya in a third (“know prakriti as maya and the great Lord as the wielder of maya,” Shvetashvatara 4.10); and it depends on the Lord (tadadhinatvat), which is the one thing the Samkhya’s pradhana refuses to do. 1.4.4: the Samkhya makes his pradhana a thing to be known, since release comes from knowing the gunas apart from the purusha; here the bare word stands in the ladder, and no sentence says the avyakta is to be known or meditated on; it is named only to light up the highest place.

1.4.5: the Samkhya tries once more: Katha 1.3.15 does speak of knowing it, “he who has perceived that which is without sound, without touch, without form, undecaying, without taste, eternal, without smell, without beginning or end, beyond the great, constant, is freed from the jaws of death.” No; by the run of the chapter that is the intelligent Self, the prajna: it is the Person beyond whom there is nothing, the Self “hidden in all beings” that the next verse calls hard to see, the one reached by restraining speech into mind and mind into intellect, and even the Samkhya does not say that perceiving the pradhana frees anyone from death. 1.4.6: the Katha asks and answers three things, no more: the fire altar (Nachiketa’s second boon, 1.1.13), the soul (“when a man has died, some say he is and some he is not,” the third boon, 1.1.20) and the highest Self (“that which you see as other than right and wrong, other than cause and effect, other than past and future,” 1.2.14); Yama’s answers match them, and Shankara shows that the last two questions are one question seen twice, since the soul and the highest Self are one, as a rope is one rope whether or not a man in the dark takes it for a snake. Three boons, three questions, three answers, and no room for a pradhana. 1.4.7: the word mahat settles it the same way: in the Veda it always keeps company with “self,” “the great self beyond the intellect,” “the great all-pervading Self” (Katha 1.2.22), “I know that great Person” (Shvetashvatara 3.8), and it never names the Samkhya’s intellect; so avyakta too wears its Vedic sense. What is decided: the pradhana rests on inference alone, and the Katha gives it no word.

Shvetashvatara 4.5 is a riddle in color: “One unborn female (aja), red, white and black, brings forth many offspring shaped like herself; one unborn male loves her and lies beside her; another unborn male leaves her once he has had his enjoyment.” The Samkhya hears his whole system in it: red is rajas, which colors and stirs; white is sattva, which is light; black is tamas, which covers; the three in balance are the pradhana, unborn because it is the root of everything and the product of nothing; her offspring are the creatures woven of her three strands; the male who lies with her is the soul in bondage, the male who leaves is the soul that has learned to tell itself apart from her. So the Veda knows the pradhana. Shankara answers in three steps. 1.4.8: the mantra on its own settles nothing, because it states no special mark; aja, red, white and black can be fitted to any doctrine by some supposition or other, so the Samkhya has no right to claim it for his alone. It is like the bowl of Brihadaranyaka 2.2.3, “there is a bowl with its mouth below and its bottom above”: from that line by itself no one could say which bowl, and the Upanishad’s own next sentence has to tell us that the bowl is the head.

So what is this aja? 1.4.9: the one “beginning with light,” the seed-matter of all beings that sprang from the Lord, fire, water and earth; one branch recites it so (tatha hy adhiyata eke), for Chandogya 6.4.1, after telling how the One sent forth fire, water and food, names and places the three colors: “the red color of fire is the color of tejas, the white the color of water, the black the color of earth.” Red, white and black are colors in the first place and gunas only by a stretch, and a text whose sense is plain governs a text whose sense is doubtful. The Shvetashvatara frames it the same way: it opens by asking “is Brahman the cause?” (1.1), speaks before this verse of “the power of God himself, hidden in its own qualities” (1.3), and says just after it, “know prakriti as maya, and the great Lord as the one who wields maya” (4.10). The aja is that power, the Lord’s own, in which names and forms lie folded before the world is unfolded, and it depends on him from first to last.

1.4.10: how can fire, water and earth, which scripture says were produced, be called unborn? Because aja here is a picture (kalpana), a she-goat. A she-goat might be patched red and white and black and have kids of her colors; one he-goat might stay by her and another wander off after his pleasure; and so the three-colored matter of the world brings forth living and lifeless things like itself, is enjoyed by souls bound in ignorance and left by souls that have come to knowledge. The sun is called honey in the madhu-vidya (Chandogya 3.1), speech a cow (Brihadaranyaka 5.8), the heavenly world a fire (Brihadaranyaka 6.2.9); the figure is the Veda’s habit and breaks no rule. Shankara adds that the two he-goats do not make souls many in truth; the bound and the freed differ by their adjuncts, and “he is the one God hidden in all beings” (Shvetashvatara 6.11) stands. What is decided: the unborn one of this verse is in no way the Samkhya’s pradhana, and it is also no name for Brahman; it is the Lord’s power, matter in its seed, whose first children are light, water and food.

Brihadaranyaka 4.4.17 says: “He in whom the five five-people and space rest, him alone I hold to be the Self; I who know hold him to be Brahman, the immortal.” The Samkhya does arithmetic: five fives are twenty-five, and twenty-five is exactly the count of his categories, the root matter, the seven from the great principle down that are both cause and effect, the sixteen that are effects only, and the purusha; so the Veda has counted his tattvas for him. Shankara refuses on three grounds in 1.4.11. First, diversity: the twenty-five Samkhya categories are each a different kind of thing, and nothing they share would gather them into five groups of five; separate things do not fall into bundles of their own accord. Second, the grammar: “five-people” (panchajanah) is one compound word with one accent, as the Brahmana’s accent shows and as Taittiriya Samhita 1.6.2.2 confirms, and by Panini’s rule such numeral compounds are names; the second “five” counts how many such classes there are, as one might speak of “the seven seven-rishis,” and it does not multiply. Third, excess: the verse names the Self in whom the five rest, and space, separately, and on the Samkhya count those would make twenty-seven, or else the purusha would be counted twice, once as the abode and once as what rests in the abode, and either way the Samkhya has given up his own number.

1.4.12: who then are the five people? The next verse answers (Brihadaranyaka 4.4.18): “they who know the breath of breath, the eye of the eye, the ear of the ear, the food of food, the mind of mind, have recognized the ancient primeval Brahman.” Breath, eye, ear, food and mind are the five, called people because they belong to people, as Chandogya 3.13.6 calls the pranas “the five persons of Brahman” and Chandogya 7.15.1 says “breath is father, breath is mother.” Others take the five people to be gods, fathers, gandharvas, asuras and rakshasas, or the four varnas with the Nishadas as a fifth, or, after Rig Veda 8.53.7, created beings at large; the sutrakara, whose aim here is to shut the Samkhya out, takes the five that the complementary verse supplies. 1.4.13: the Kanva recension lacks “the food of food” and names only four; there the count is filled by the “light” of the verse before, “him the gods worship as the light of lights” (Brihadaranyaka 4.4.16). The Madhyandinas have their five in one verse and need no light; the Kanvas cannot do without it; one text draws on a neighbor for what another already holds, as the shodashi cup is offered in one rite and left out in another. What is decided: the five are what the Upanishad itself lists, and the Samkhya’s twenty-five are nowhere in it.

A new objection, and this time it is built from the Upanishads’ own disagreements. One text has space come first from the Self (Taittiriya 2.1), another fire (Chandogya 6.2.3), another breath and then faith (Prashna 6.4), another the waters above, light, the mortal earth and the waters below, in no order at all (Aitareya Aranyaka 2.4.1). One says “non-being was this in the beginning; from it being was born” (Taittiriya 2.7), another “non-being was this in the beginning; it became being; it grew” (Chandogya 3.19.1), while a third rejects that very view, “how could being be born from non-being?” (Chandogya 6.2.2); and the Brihadaranyaka seems to let the world unfold on its own, “all this was then unmanifest; it became manifest by name and form” (1.4.7). With a settled fact there is no choosing as there is with a rite, the objector says, so texts that disagree can settle nothing about the cause, and the cause must be sought from smriti and reason, which is to say from the Samkhya. 1.4.14 answers: the texts differ about the things made, space and the rest, and about their order; about the maker they say one thing. As the cause is described in any one of them, all-knowing, Lord of all, Self of all, one without a second, so it is described in all of them.

Taittiriya 2 calls it “real, knowledge, infinite,” then has it desire, calls it Self, seats it within the sheaths as the inmost of every being, has it “become many” and “create all this, whatever there is”; Chandogya 6.2 says “Being alone was this in the beginning, one without a second; it thought, may I be many; it sent forth fire”; the Aitareya says “the Self alone was this in the beginning; he thought, let me send forth worlds.” On the cause the accounts are in tune throughout. A quarrel about the order of effects cannot reach back and unsettle a cause on which all agree; the order will be reconciled in Book 2 in any case; and the creation stories were never what scripture set out to teach, since no one’s good depends on knowing whether fire or space came first. They serve the knowledge of Brahman: “as food is an offshoot, seek its root, water; as water is an offshoot, seek its root, fire; as fire is an offshoot, seek its root, the Real” (Chandogya 6.8.4), and the clay of 6.1.4 is there to show that an effect is nothing apart from its cause; Gaudapada says the same, that clay and iron and sparks are told of only so that non-difference may be understood.

The fruit scripture does promise is the knowing of Brahman: “the knower of Brahman reaches the highest,” “the knower of the Self crosses sorrow,” “knowing him one passes beyond death.” 1.4.15 takes up “non-being.” Taittiriya 2.7 cannot mean sheer nothing, because the same chapter has just said that whoever knows Brahman as non-being becomes non-being himself, has set Brahman within the sheaths, has had it desire and create, and has called it “the Real,” and only then adds “on this there is a verse: non-being was this in the beginning.” The word is drawn back (samakarsha) to the Brahman of its own context: “being” is what has names and forms, “non-being” the same thing before they came out. Chandogya 3.19.1 continues “it became being,” so the non-being there is no sheer nothing either; Chandogya 6.2.1 reports non-being as what “others say” only to refute it, since one may choose between rites and never between facts; and the Brihadaranyaka’s “it became manifest” has its ruler in the very next clause, “he entered in here to the tips of the nails,” for if nothing ruled the unfolding there would be no one for that “he” to be, and “let me enter these three with this living self and unfold name and form” (Chandogya 6.3.2) says who it was; “it unfolded itself” is said as one says “the field reaps itself,” of work done with ease by an agent who is there all the same. What is decided: on the order of creation the texts may differ and it does not matter; on the cause they speak with one voice, the intelligent Brahman.

Kaushitaki 4 tells of Gargya Balaki, learned and proud, who came to Ajatashatru of Kashi and offered, “Let me tell you Brahman.” He named the person in the sun, then in the moon, in lightning and thunder, in wind, space, fire and water, in the mirror and the shadow and the echo, in the body and in the eye, sixteen in all, and the king knew each one already and set each one aside. When Balaki fell silent the king said, “In vain did you say, let me tell you Brahman. He who is the maker of these persons, he of whom this is the work, he alone is to be known” (4.19). Who is the maker? The opponent says the vital air: “work” means motion, and motion rests on breath; the sequel says “then he becomes one with that prana alone”; and breath is the maker of the persons in sun and moon, since the gods are breath’s own forms, “which is the one god? Breath, and that is Brahman” (Brihadaranyaka 3.9.9). Or, he says, it is the soul: “this is the work” can mean merit and demerit, the soul enjoys through those persons as its instruments, the king wakes a sleeping man with his staff to show Balaki that the enjoyer is other than breath, and “as the master eats with his people, so this conscious self eats with the other selves” (4.20) names an enjoyer; of the Lord there is no mark at all.

1.4.16: the maker is Brahman, because “work” here means the world. Balaki opened by offering Brahman; the king dismissed his sixteen persons as souls who share the light of the lower Brahman and proposed their maker as the new thing to be known; if that maker were another such soul the opening would be empty. “Work” (karma), neuter and singular, cannot mean motion or merit, since neither has been spoken of; it cannot mean the persons, who are named separately; it cannot mean the act of making them or its result, since those are already in “maker.” What is left is “this,” the world in front of the eyes, and the “or” in the king’s sentence lifts the limit: maker of these persons, or rather of everything that is. The persons are singled out so that Balaki will stop calling them Brahman, and all Vedanta texts say the maker of the world is the highest Lord. 1.4.17: if someone says the marks of the soul and of the vital air in the sequel decide for them, that was explained under 1.1.31: taken literally they would yield three meditations, one on Brahman, one on the soul, one on breath, which the opening and the close forbid, since the close promises the knower a reward only Brahman gives, “warding off all evil he obtains preeminence among all beings, sovereignty, supremacy”; and “prana” is a name of Brahman elsewhere too, “the mind settles down on prana” (Chandogya 6.8.2).

1.4.18: Jaimini goes further: the mention of the soul serves another purpose, which is to point at Brahman. After the sleeper is roused the king asks, “Balaki, where did this person sleep, where was he, from where did he come back?” and the answer is, “when sleeping he sees no dream, then he becomes one with that prana alone; from that Self the pranas go out each to its place, from the pranas the gods, from the gods the worlds.” That in which the soul sleeps without a trace of its particular knowing, and from which breath, gods and worlds proceed, is the highest Self. The Vajasaneyins tell the same story (Brihadaranyaka 2.1) with the words made plain: they ask where “the person made of cognition” was, answer “in the space within the heart,” and add “all the selves came forth from that Self.” Rousing the sleeper, which showed that the soul is other than breath, also shows that the text was never about breath. What is decided: the maker of the persons is Brahman; the soul is named on the way so that Brahman may be found.

Brihadaranyaka 2.4, told again at 4.5, is the Maitreyi dialogue. Yajnavalkya, about to leave home for the forest, offers to divide his property between his two wives, and Maitreyi asks, “If this whole earth full of wealth were mine, would I be immortal by it?” “No,” he says, “your life would be the life of the wealthy; by wealth there is no hope of immortality.” “Then what would I do with what cannot make me immortal? Tell me what you know.” And he begins: a husband is dear for the sake of the Self, a wife for the sake of the Self, sons, wealth, the worlds, the gods, all beings, all this, dear for the sake of the Self; “the Self is to be seen, to be heard, to be thought on, to be meditated on, Maitreyi; when the Self has been seen, heard, thought on and known, all this is known.” Which self is to be seen, the jiva or the highest? The opponent says the jiva, by the force of the opening: husband and wife and wealth are dear for the sake of a self that enjoys them, so the self then named as the thing to see is that same enjoyer; later the text says “this great being, endless, boundless, a mass of knowledge, rises out of these elements and vanishes after them; once departed there is no more consciousness” (2.4.12), which describes the cognitional self; the closing question, “how should one know the knower?” uses a word for an agent; and “all this is known” must then be loosened to mean that the world of enjoyments is known through the one who enjoys it.

1.4.19: the highest Self, from the connected sense of the whole passage (vakyanvaya). Maitreyi asked for immortality, which shruti and smriti grant through knowledge of the highest Self alone. “All this is known” is true in its plain sense only of the highest cause, and the text will not let it be loosened, since it goes on, “whoever looks for the Brahmin class anywhere except in the Self is abandoned by the Brahmin class,” and so for the rest, ending “this all is the Self” (2.4.6); the drum, the conch and the lute follow, whose notes cannot be caught apart from the instrument, as effects are caught in their cause; “from this great being has been breathed out the Rig Veda” (2.4.10) makes the Self the source of names, forms and works; and 2.4.12 calls it the one with neither inside nor outside, a mass of knowledge entire. Then three teachers of the tradition are quoted on why the opening may name the enjoying self as the one to be seen.

1.4.20: Ashmarathya says it marks the keeping of the promise, “when the Self is known, all this is known”; were the jiva other than the highest Self, knowing the highest would leave the jiva unknown and the promise would fail, so the opening treats the two as non-different. 1.4.21: Audulomi says the soul, cleansed by knowledge and meditation, becomes one with the highest Self when it departs the body, “that serene one, rising from this body and reaching the highest light, stands forth in its own form” (Chandogya 8.12.3), and as rivers lose name and form in the sea (Mundaka 3.2.8), so the opening speaks of a oneness to come as if it were already here. 1.4.22: Kashakritsna says it is because the highest Self itself stands in the condition of the jiva (avasthiti): “let me enter these three with this living self and unfold name and form” (Chandogya 6.3.2); when scripture tells of the making of fire, water and earth it tells of no separate making of a soul, so the soul is no product; the unchanged highest Lord himself is the jiva, and nothing else is. Shankara weighs the three and takes Kashakritsna’s, because it alone agrees with what every Vedanta text drives at, “you are that”; only on it is immortality the fruit of knowing the soul, since a soul that was a product would perish in its cause when it merged; name and form belong to the adjuncts and are laid on the soul only in a manner of speaking; and the sparks that fly from the fire in other texts are sparks of the adjuncts.

The three sutras also dispose of the opponent’s other marks. “Rises out of these elements and vanishes after them; once departed there is no more consciousness” says only that particular knowing ends when the adjuncts fall away; Maitreyi protests, “here you have bewildered me,” and Yajnavalkya replies that the Self is imperishable and that what ends is its connection with the elements. And “how should one know the knower?” comes after “where there is duality as it were, one sees another,” and is spoken to show that in true knowledge there is no seeing of another and no knowing even of oneself as an object; the knower there is the one who is knowledge. Shankara closes hard: the difference between the jiva and the highest Self is made by the adjuncts, body and the rest, which are the work of name and form and of ignorance; those who insist on the two as separate stand against the sense of the Vedanta texts, block the knowledge that is the door to the highest good, and make release a thing produced, which would make it perishable. Ramanuja reads Kashakritsna the other way around, as the highest Self abiding within the jiva as its inner controller with the two kept distinct; that is his reading, and it is the view Shankara here declines.

Brahman has been defined as that from which the world arises, stands and returns (1.1.2). Two kinds of cause answer to such a definition: the clay and the gold out of which pots and ornaments are made, and the potter and the goldsmith who make them. Which is Brahman? The opponent says the maker only. Creation is preceded by reflection, “he reflected, he created prana” (Prashna 6.3 to 6.4), and in experience only makers reflect, potters and the like, while a result wants several factors working together; Brahman is called Lord, and lords, kings and the son of Vivasvat among them, are known as makers only; and the world is made of parts, unconscious and impure, while Brahman is “without parts, without action, tranquil, faultless, stainless” (Shvetashvatara 6.19), and cause and effect are alike in kind, so some material of the world’s own impure kind must stand beside Brahman, the material the Samkhya smriti knows, with Brahman’s causality kept to the maker’s part. 1.4.23: Brahman is the material cause (prakriti) as well, because only so do the promise and the examples hold. The promise is Chandogya 6.1.3, “that teaching by which the unheard becomes heard, the unthought thought, the unknown known,” and the example is 6.1.4, “as by one lump of clay all that is made of clay is known, the modification being only a name that has its origin in speech, the truth being clay alone,” followed by the gold and the iron.

Knowing one thing gives knowledge of everything only when that thing is their stuff, since an effect is nothing apart from its material; a carpenter is one thing and the house he built is another. Mundaka 1.1.3 asks “what is that, knowing which all this is known?” and answers with plants growing from the earth (1.1.7); Brihadaranyaka 4.5.6 promises “when the Self is known, all this is known” and gives the drum, whose beats are caught by catching the drum. The ablative “from which” in Taittiriya 3.1 is the grammarian’s case for a material. And Brahman is the maker too, because there is no one else to direct the work: clay waits for a potter and gold for a goldsmith, while before creation Brahman was “one without a second,” and if another director were admitted the promise would fail again, since knowing one thing would leave the director unknown. 1.4.24: the reflection the opponent leaned on proves both at once: “it thought, may I be many, may I grow forth” (Chandogya 6.2.3; Taittiriya 2.6 has “it desired”) shows an agent who acts after thinking, and “may I be many” shows that what it meant to multiply was itself. 1.4.25: both the origin and the dissolution are said outright to have Brahman for their material, “all these beings arise from space alone and go back into space” (Chandogya 1.9.1), and space there is Brahman (1.1.22); that from which a thing comes and into which it returns is its material, as the earth is of rice and barley, and “alone” shuts out any other.

1.4.26: “it made itself” (Taittiriya 2.7, tad atmanam svayam akuruta) has the Self as agent and as thing made in one breath, which is possible through modification (parinama): the cause, already there, modifies itself into the effect, as clay into the pot; the word “itself” again leaves no other maker; and Taittiriya 2.6, “it became both the defined and the undefined,” sets Brahman and its modified form side by side. 1.4.27: Brahman is called the source, yoni: “that which the wise regard as the source of beings” (Mundaka 1.1.6), “the Person whose source is Brahman” (Mundaka 3.1.3); in common speech the earth is the yoni of trees and herbs, and though yoni can mean a mere seat (“a yoni was made for you to sit on,” Rig Veda 1.104.1), the spider that “sends out and draws in its threads” in the same Mundaka passage (1.1.7) fixes the sense as source. As for reflection belonging only to potters, this matter is settled by scripture and never by inference from the workshop, and scripture teaches that the Lord who reflects is also the stuff of what he makes. What is decided: Brahman is both causes of the world, and how it can modify itself and stay what it is will be Book 2’s work (2.1.14 onward). The opponent here is anyone who keeps a Lord who is maker only with a matter beside him, the Samkhya who admits a Lord and the logicians with him; this adhikarana is written against them.

The last sutra of Book 1: by this, all are explained, all are explained. The pradhana has been taken up and refuted since 1.1.5 wherever a text seemed to lean its way, and Shankara says why it earned so much attention: some Vedanta sentences can look to a dull eye as if they hinted at it; it stands near Vedanta in holding that cause and effect are one thing; and authors of dharma sutras such as Devala accepted it.

The atomists and the rest were given no such hearing, and this sutra extends the finished refutation to them: their doctrines too have no footing in scripture and are contradicted by it outright, and once the chief rival has fallen the lesser ones need no separate siege. The doubled “explained, explained” is the traditional mark that a book has ended.

Book 2 takes the fight onto the ground of reasoning: first the objection that this leaves the smriti of Kapila no room, then the Samkhya, the Vaisheshika, the Buddhists and the Jainas in turn, and then the Upanishads’ own accounts of creation squared with one another.

Context: this closing joins in sequence with the opening sutra of Book 2.1, “smrity-anavakasha-dosha-prasanga iti chen nanya-smrity-anavakasha-dosha-prasangat”, which answers the charge that this reading leaves certain smritis no room by showing that the opposite reading would leave other smritis none.