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By Jayaram V
Brahman is the central theme of almost all the Upanishads.
Brahman is the indescribable, inexhaustible, omniscient,
omnipresent, original, first, eternal
and absolute principle who is without a beginning, without an
end , who is hidden in all and who is the cause, source,
material and effect of all creation known, unknown and yet to
happen in the entire universe.
He is the incomprehensible, unapproachable radiant being
whom the ordinary senses and ordinary intellect cannot fathom
grasp or able to describe even with partial success. He is the
mysterious Being totally out of the reach of all sensory
activity, rationale effort and mere intellectual, decorative
and pompous endeavor.
The Upanishads describe Him as the One and indivisible,
eternal universal self, who is present in all and in whom all
are present. Generally unknown and mysterious to the ordinary
masses, Brahman of the Upanishads remained mostly confined to
the meditative minds of the ancient seers who considered Him to
be too sacred and esoteric to be brought out and dissected
amidst public glare.
Though impassioned and above the ordinary feelings of the
mind, the masters of the Upanishads some times could not
suppress the glory, the emotion, the passion and the poetry
that accompanied the vast and utterly delightful , inner
experience of His vast vision. In the Mundaka Upanishad the
mind explodes to reverberate with this verse," Imperishable is
the Lord of love, as from a blazing fire thousands of sparks
leap forth, so millions of beings arise from Him and return to
Him." Again in the Katha Upanishad we come across a very poetic
and emphatic expression, "In His robe are woven heaven and
earth, mind and body...He is the bridge from death to deathless
life."
The Brahman of the Upanishads is not meant for the ordinary
or the ignorant souls, who are accustomed to seek spiritual
solace through ritualistic practices and rationalization of
knowledge. Discipline, determination, guidance form a
self-realized soul, purity of mind, mastery of the senses,
self-control and desireless actions are some of the
pre-requisites needed to achieve even a semblance of success on
this path. Only the strong of the heart and pure of the mind
can think of dislodging layer after layer of illusion and
ignorance that surrounds him and see the golden light of Truth
beckoning from beyond.
He is not like the other gods either. He is incomprehensible
even to almost all the gods. And He chooses not to be
worshipped in the temples and other places of worship but in
one's heart and mind as the indweller of the material body and
master of the senses, the charioteer. He is too remote and
incomprehensible to be revered and approached with personal
supplications although He is the deepest and the highest vision
mankind could ever conceive of or attain.
The weak and the timid stand no chance to approach Him even
remotely, except through some circuitous route. For the
materialistic and the otherworldly who excel in the art of
converting everything and anything into a source of personal
gain, He does not offer any attraction, solace or security as a
personal God.
That is why we do not see any temples or forms of
ritualistic worship existing for Brahman either at present or
in the past. We only hear of fire sacrifice, later to be called
Nachiketa fire, to attain Him, which was taught to the young
Nachiketa by Lord of Death, but lost in the course of time to
us. Perhaps the sacrifice was more a meditative or spiritual
practice involving the sacrifice of soul consciousness than a
ritual worship.
Whatever it is, the fact is that Brahman of the Upanishads is
more appealing to the seekers of Truth and Knowledge than
seekers of material gains. Even during the Islamic rule when
the principles of monotheism challenged the very foundations of
Hinduism , Brahman was never brought into the glare of public
debate to challenge the invading and overwhelming ideas of the
monotheistic foreign theology.
And even during the period of the Bhakti movement , when the
path of devotion assumed unparalleled importance in the
medieval Hindu society, Brahman was somehow not made the center
of direct worship in the form of Brahman as such. He became the
personal God with a name and form, but as Brahman remained out
side the preview of the Bhakti movement.
Perhaps the exclusion was so evident and seemingly so
intentional that even Lord Brahma, the first among the Trinity
and the first among the created, was also simultaneously
excluded from the ritualistic worship, probably for the
similarity in names. Very few temples exist for this god even
today in India, probably as He is seen more as a source of
intelligence and creativity than of material wealth.
Some Upanishads do describe Brahman as the Lord of Love. It
is a description born out of pure personal experience of a
seeker of truth, not from a devotee's imaginative and
self-induced emotional energy. The description and approach,
therefore, is more philosophical and impressionably revelatory
in its approach than feverishly emotional or reverently
devotional. The reason was not difficult to understand.
Brahman was too remote, indifferent, disinterested, too vast
a principle to be reduced into meaningful and intellectually
satisfying forms and shapes and worshipped as such. Existing
beyond all the surface activities of illusory life, he was like
the remote star, heard but rarely seen, seen but vaguely
remembered, remembered but rarely explicable, unlike the daily
sun that traversed across the sky spreading its splendor in all
directions and appealing to the common man with its intensity,
visible luminosity and comforting him with its assuring and
predictable routine.
Hidden, however, in the practice of Bhakti was the inherent
and inviolable belief that the aim of all devotion was the
attainment of the Supreme Self, though the path chosen for the
purpose was circuitous and symbolic, rarely suggestive of any
direct involvement of the eternal Brahman Himself in His
original formless condition. Since the mind could only
comprehend and derive inspiration in a language that it can
understand and interpret, the Saguna Brahman, Iswara in the
form of various manifestations became the object of devotion
and personal worship.
But the same was not true of the formless Nirguna Brahman,
beyond duality and activity. Ignoring the citadels of human
civilization, He, the Absolute, continued to remain in the
hearts of His spiritual aspirants, away from the din of
materialistic life. He remained confined even as of today, to a
few illumined minds, guiding them in His mysterious and
invisible ways through the minds of self-realized souls, who
have been too spiritualistic and disinterested in worldly life
to consider any thing other than self as a matter of spiritual
interest.
The ancient seers described Brahman as the One eternal
principle, the unity behind all, the connecting principle, the
light shining through all. But at the same time they also
referred to him variously as almost every thing. He was thus
One and the many, the finite and the infinite, the center as
well as the circumference, the enjoyer as well the enjoyer, the
hidden as well as the manifest, in a nut shell, every thing and
any thing that we can conceive of or imagine or perhaps much
more than that. Incomprehensible even to the gods, as Kena
Upanishad narrates, He stands above all, tall and mysterious,
almost incommunicable except through personal experience and
inner voyage.
As a formless Being He was the Nirguna Brahman, the
unqualified principle totally beyond the reach of all levels of
intelligence. Assuming myriad forms He becomes Saguna Brahman,
the one with attributes and qualifications. In this capacity as
the formless and the One with form, He becomes all the
multiplicity in this vast universe. He becomes everything and
also nothing. Thus He is the day and night, light and darkness,
knowledge and ignorance, the river and the ocean, the sky and
the earth, the sound and the silence, the smallest as well as
biggest of all and also the abyss of the mysterious
nothingness.
The attributes are many and repetitively suggestive of His
universality and His unquestionable supremacy. This existence
of the duality and the myriad contradictions inherent in the
creation of life are the riddles which the minds of the
disciples were expected to understand and assimilate till all
the confusion and contradiction becomes reduced to one
harmonious and meaningful mass of Truth.
In the Katha Upanishad we come across this explanation of
Brahman being compared to the Aswaththa tree in reverse ,whose
roots are above and the branches spread down below. "Its pure
root is Brahman from whom the world draws nourishment and whom
none can surpass." Actually this is an analogy drawn from the
Sun whose base is above and whose rays spread downwards in
thousand directions.
Myriad are the ways in which Brahman is described in the
Upanishads. The verses strenuously struggle to explain the
novice students of spiritual practice the immensity of the
object of their meditation. Theirs is a feeling of respect and
reverence mixed with fear and awe. Even the gods seems to be
not very comfortable with this concept of an unknown,
mysterious and unfathomable God. The Lord of death explains to
the young Nachiketa, "In fear of Him the fire burns, the sun
shines, the clouds rain and the winds blow. In fear of Him
death stalks about to kill."
He is the creator, the life giver and also the reliever of
the devoted and determined from Bondage. The manifest universe
is his creation. He created it through Self-projection, out of
Ananda, pure Delight. The process of creation is not very
explicitly mentioned but one can draw some inferences from
verses such as this, "The deathless Self meditated upon Himself
and projected the universe as an evolutionary energy. From this
energy developed life, the mind, the elements, and the world of
karma."
This is not the God who can be supplicated with rituals and
sacrifices. The Upanishadic seers did not show much respect to
the outer aspects of religious practice. The rituals according
to them constituted the lower knowledge. "Such rituals,"
declares Mundaka Upanishad, " are unsafe rafts for crossing the
sea of worldly life, of birth and death. Doomed to shipwreck
are they who try to cross the sea of worldly life on these poor
rafts." The argument does not end here. It goes on," Ignorant
of their ignorance, yet wise in their estimate, these deluded
men proud of their learning go round and round like the blind,
led by the blind. Living in darkness, immature unaware of any
higher good or goal, they fall again and again into the sea."
To read the concluding part of the essay on Brahman click on
the first link provided below.
Suggested Further Reading
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