If Uddalaka was a hylozoist
(primitive materialist) and the oldest Indian philosopher, as I argued, then be
stands side by side with the oldest Greek philosopher, Thales, who also was a
hylozoist and lived only a short time after Uddalaka. Perhaps Chinese
philosophy also began in nearly the same period of the history of mankind with a
similar type of materialism.5. Thus, the world-history of philosophy might come
to the conclusion that philosophy and materialism had to begin with such steps
of development, there being no other traditions of philosophy than those of India, China
and Europe. Side by side with the types of
Indian hylozoism-as that of Thales (water), Anaximenes (air) and Heraclitus
(fire)-mankind has developed the 'Indian and perhaps Chinese types, and
comparing and c0ntrasting all these hylozoist-materialisms, our historians of
philosophy will one day come to a proper and comprehensive definition of hylozoism
and its role in the development of philosophy, namely as the first or one of
the first primitive forms of materialism. In. similar ways Yajnavalkya's
idealism is to be compared and contrasted with Greek idealism of the
Eleatics-Parmenides etc.-and the oldest Chinese idealism. In this way, the general
history of philosophy helps the Indologist to understand the history of
philosophy of India,
while at the same time the Indologist with his interpretation of Indian
materials enriches the general history of philosophy, which is the highest
possible theory of history of all the different philosophies.
But was Uddalaka's doctrine
really hylozoist-materialism? My revered teacher Herman Jacobi was the first to
maintain that Uddalaka taught some materialistic elements. He started from the
struggle between the later Samkhyas who claimed that the sat of Uddalaka was
matter (prakrti) while later
Vedantins interpreted it as brahman.6 Jacobi stressed the point that in Vedic
mentality the distinction between mind and matter was not yet quite clear and
he illustrated 'this fact with the help of Uddalaka's text in "'hose
cosmogony, sat, tejas etc. were
thinking and willing. Although, thus, in Uddalaka's teaching the material
elements were living, although, moreover, the distinction between matter and
mind was not yet quite clear, he maintained that Uddalaka's doctrine was
basically materialistic. 7
In 1940, H: V. Glasenapp quoted
Uddalaka's philosophy with the same intention in order to show that the ancient
Indians did not distinguish between mind and matter.8 But in 1949 he criticized Jacobi,
maintaining that this doctrine could not be labelled as materialistic
philosophy because the distinction between mind and matter was not clear in
that ancient period.9 This is the reason why I, in 1954, characterized
Uddalaka as hylozoist, which just means that according to his philosophy,
matter was living' and thinking indeed. Glasenapp, in 1954 and 1956 attacked my
interpretation without adding new arguments.10 The problem is, accordingly,
whether hylozoism is to be regarded as materialism or idealism (pantheism). In
1961 Dale Riepe, following my interpretation, characterized Uddalaka's
philosophy as "a hylozoist and perhaps even materialistic" view of
the world.11
On the other hand, E. Zeller characterized Thales as early as 1851 as
"pantheistic hylozoist", stressing the point that in accordance with
the old fantastic interpretation of nature which everywhere preceded science,
Thales thought everything to be living,12 and the cosmos to be ensouled and full of
spirits,13
but that he did not teach the doctrine of a world-soul. Correspondingly, H. Jacobi
already had observed that brahman was
not mentioned in Uddiilaka's philosophy.14 In this regard Uddalaka is similar to Thales,
both being hylozoists, not idealist, but rather primitive materialists.
When Jacobi and Glasenapp
underlined the fact that in those old times mind and matter were not clearly
distinguished, Glasenapp himself quoted Yajnavalkya describing
atman as mind, as
vijnanaghana, vijnanamayapurusa etc. in contrast to all other
things,
15 - contrasting,
thus, matter and mind as a full-fledged idealist. There is, on the other hand,
in his idealism this link between mind and matter that minj is the origin of
matter, as Glasenapp also held. But this thesis of Yajnavalkya does not, as
Glasenapp pretends, involve that at that period the distinction between mind
and matter was not yet perfect and that, therefore, one cannot differentiate
between the idealism of Yajnavalkya and the materialism of Uddalaka. On' the
c0ntrary, the doctrine that mind is the primary reality and matter the
secondary one is typical for idealism while materialism regards nature as the
primary one.
16
The doctrine of
maya and
vivarta is not yet to be found in Yajnavalkya's
philosophy, indeed, in so far as his idealism is still primitive, just as
Uddalaka's materialism is. Everything was just developing, and what we find in
the ancient Upanisads is just the beginning of philosophy in its two
antagonistic forms, materialism and idealism.
Let us now compare and contrast
both these thinkers in some details in order to show their difference in materialistic
and idealistic thinking. Both, being contemporaneous, deal to a great extent
with similar topics which were eminently important for the Brahmanical thinkers
of that old period; but both do so in different ways.
1. Death
Uddalaka describes a dying
man,-how he loses first his mind (the faculty of recognizing his relatives),
then his speech, after that his breath, and finally, his warmth. This is quite
a rational description of death based on sound observation. It is, at the same
time, in fairly good but not quite perfect-concordance with Uddalaka's cosmogony,
according to which out of sat
developed tejah, apah and annam;
annam becoming mind, apah breath, and tejah speech. He does not mention an eternal soul or the doctrine
of karman in his chapter on death. Mind, speech, breath and warmth enter sat,
sat being the ultimate or first living material which is eternal, and is truth:
tat tvam asi.
Yajnavalkya, on the other hand,
deals with the problem of death in several places. He teaches first how a man
can become free from death by the help of vedic priests, climbing up to heaven
(Br. Up. iii. 1, 3-6). He teaches
then how the body of a dying man dissolves into earth etc., the mind enters the
moon, eye the sun, breath the wind, speech the fire etc., but he adds, man
himself,-his eternal soul,-is following the way of karman (Br. Up. iii. 2, 13).
Yajnavalkya gives later on a hint that after death man's soul goes to Indra in
the heart, the soul being indestructible (Br.
Up. iii. 2). He teaches finally how the soul (purusa) leaves the weakening body like a ripe fruit leaving the
tree, and turns to its origin, the atman. Just as a king leaves a village, accompanied
by warriors, judges etc., the soul is accompanied by the pranas and enters the 'heart together with them. When then the eye
leaves for the sun, the purusa enters
the heart together with them. When then the eye leaves for the sun, the purusa does not see any longer,-he does
not smell, taste, speak, think, etc. Together with the prii~tas he leaves the
body, guided by his knowledge and karman
in order to be reborn or to reach moksa
(Br.. Up. iv. 3, 35 seq.).
Uddalaka observed rationalistically
how thinking (recognizing) of a dying man, speaking and breathing stop one
after another and how the body finally becomes cold. Yajnavalkya also taught
that all the faculties of seeing, smelling, tasting, speaking, hearing,
thinking, touching and knowing of a dying man disappear. But while Uddalaka
observed death' with commonsense or even with the eyes of a physician, Yajnavalkya
had no such scholarly interest but enumerated all faculties from seeing to
knowing, regarding this only as a minor point, and described with much details
the wandering of the eternal soul first into the heart and then out of the
body, a wandering which he had never observed. He did not care for proper
observation which can be controlled by everybody. His main interest was a religious
one, not scientific. He was an idealist in contrast to the materialist
Uddalaka.
Uddalaka next described a dying
tree, which is being felled. The rasa
leaves one bough after the other and finally the whole tree; he adds the rasa does not die. This life is satya (Ch. Up. vi. 11). According to
Uddalaka, water (apah) is life or
breath (prana) (Ch. Up. vi. 5, 2), and a man while fasting is obliged to drink
water in order to preserve his life (Ch.
Up. vi. 7, 1). The rasa of the
tree is some kind of water and is at the same time the life of the tree. When a
bough is cut, rasa and life leave it;
but rasa or life is not destroyed but
goes on existing in the sat into which it has gone after the death of the tree.
Sat is living matter; it is eternal
according to this hylozoism.
Yajnavalkya also described at the
end of his long discussion the death of a tree, comparing the tree with the
body of a man, especially the rasa
with the blood, coming out of a wounded tree, tree and body, respectively (Br. Up. iii. 9, 28 Sloka 2). But his
interest is not focused on the rasa.
He cares for the fact that a tree, when felled, is growing again from its root.
Only if the root is destroyed, the tree cannot grow again. He asks his adversaries
in the discussion: What corresponds to this growing again of the tree out of
its root as regards a man? He also knows the answer: Rebirth out of brahman. Here again the
difference between Yajnavalkya's religious intention and Uddalaka's materialism
becomes clear.'
Yajnavalkya in another place maintains
that at death blood and semen enter water, just as the body enters earth (Br,. Up. iii. 2, 13), when the soul
follows the ways of karman, whilst
Uddalaka taught that the ultimate living material into which the decaying body
enters is eternal. Yajnavalkya taught that the individual body dissolves in the
dead material which might be eternal, but the individual soul is what matters,
being born again and again according to karman.
Here again the religious idea of rebirth prevails in the doctrine of Yajnavalkya.
And his idealism becomes also
clear in another place where he teaches that the heart is the base on which the
semen is founded just as water is based on the semen and as Varuna, the
protector of ,the western region, is based on water. In similar ways the other
human faculties, like seeing etc., are based on the respective objects, the
forms etc., which are founded in the heart, the faculties being on the other
hand the base for a respective gods in one of the different regions. Thus the
heart is the ultimate base of the world, - the subjective heart being the base
of the objective forms etc. - which is an idealistic outlook.
In order to persuade his opponent
Yajnavalkya adds that people, regarding a son who similar to his father, say
that he has come out of the heart of his father. This custom proves, he
pretends, that the semen descends from the heart (Br. Up. iii. 9, 21). But this cannot prove the doctrine that water
is based on semen, Varuna on water in the western region, - in short, the
idealism of Yajnavalkya cannot be proved in this way.
2. Sleep
Uddalaka interprets sleep (svapna) with the help of an etymology
as svam apitah: a sleeping man is
gone into himself. He illustrates this fanciful etymology with the example of a
bird which flies all around and finally sits down at the place of its binding.
It seems that a falcon is meant which is bound to some place as long as it is
not used for hunting, Thus, Uddalaka goes on, the manas flies all around till it sits down at its binding place, the
breath (Ch. Up. vi. 8, 1-2). This
means: The mind of a per-son awake wanders from object to object till the man
gets tired, then manas comes back
into the man (svam apitah) and
settles on the breath. A sleeping man does not think indeed, but his breath
goes on. Without breath there can be no thinking, as all tile so-called
magicians of the doctrine of breath-wind 17 had shown. Breath binds mind to body according
to Uddalaka.
This doctrine reminds us of the
discussion between Yajnavalkya and Uddalaka where Uddalaka asks for the string
which binds this world and the world beyond and all beings together, and Yajnavalkya
answers: This string is the wind (Br.
Up. iii. 7, 1-2). Uddalaka agrees to this answer. Wind and breath were
regarded as the ultimate realities in macro-and-micro-cosms by the
above-mentioned magicians of wind and breath, and Uddalaka was closely related
to their way of thinking. 18 Yajnavalkya in this case answered the question
of his opponent according to what he knew of his, - ie. Uddalaka's - conception
of the importance of the binding wind-breath. But Yajnavalkya's own doctrine of
sleep was quite different from that of Uddalaka.
Uddalaka imagined manas when awake as migrating out of the
body and when it falls asleep returning into it, into svam, that is into atman into
the Self, svam atmanam meaning body
in this hylozoist-materialistic theory in concordance with the very old conception
that the self is the body. 19
Yajnavalkya, on the other hand,
spoke also in connection with sleep of the bird, of an eagle or falcon which,
out of fatigue, sits down. Similarly he goes on; the purusa hurries to the antah
where he sees no dream (Br. Up. iv.3,
19). The manas in Uddalaka's
doctrine wanders outside the body in order to come into contact with reality to
get proper knowledge. But the purusa
in Yajnavalkya's theory wanders to a region far away from the body in dream and
sleep in order to enjoy freedom of the objective world of daily life. This
difference marks again the difference between materialism and idealism.
This antah (end) of sleep is opposed to the antah of being awake (ib.
18), and the puru~a wanders along both anta~ just as a fish swims along both
sides of a river. The antah-s are
also called loka-s (worlds) or sthana-s (places), and there is a third sthana, the region of dreams, which
connects the two other sthana-s.
Standing in third dream-place, the purusa
looks at both the worlds, the world of suffering here and that of bliss
beyond. And when he falls asleep, he creates with the material which he takes
from this world the objects in the world of dreams-chariots, lakes, rivers,
rejoicings, etc. On this occasion Yajnavalkya quotes some stanzas which deal
with the phenomenon of dream in somewhat other ways. They have a shamanistic
outlook. According to them the soul of a sleeping man leaves the body, does not
fall asleep itself, looks at the sleeping body, which is protected by breath,
roams around as it wants, being eternal, the golden man, the single swan (ib. 11-12). So far this theory of sleep
and dream is in full concordance with primitive shamanistic ideas which are well-known
from Central Asia, etc.20 According to them mind or soul
leaves the body in contrast to Uddalaka’s conception that in sleep mind comes
back into the body.
Then the next stanza goes on: In
sleep he creates many forms, enjoying women, eating or seeing dangers (ib. 13). This corresponds with Yajnavalkya's
idealistic conception of the purusa creating
in Dream Rivers etc.,
which is also in complete contrast to Uddalaka’s description of sleep which
looks very realistic, in correspondence with his general contrast of the
materialism with Yajnavalkya's idealism.
Uddalaka later on describes how a
man, falling asleep,21 enters sat and becomes unaware of his
individuality, just as the rasa-s of
different flowers lose their identity and the knowledge of it when they become
one and the same mass of honey. But when the man awakes he gets back his
individuality and its consciousness. Just as rivers become united in the ocean
and (by evaporation and rainfall) come out of the ocean22 again without being conscious of
having been united and having forgotten their individuality during their stay
in the ocean, thus men also, when awakened, do not remember that they have been
in sleep united in sat, losing their individuality and its consciousness (Ch. Up. vi, 9-10).
Correspondingly, Yajnavalkya
taught that in sleep a father becomes a non-father, a mother a non-mother,
worlds become non-worlds, gods non-gods, Vedas non-Vedas, the thief a
non-thief and in the same way a murderer of an embryo, a Candala, a Paulkasa, a
sramana and a tapasa lose their identity (Br.
Up. iv. 3, 22), because in sleep there is neither good nor evil. This
stressing of the moral aspect is missing in Uddalaka’s teaching of sleep whilst
Yajnavalkya is interested in describing sleep as something happy, free from
the sufferings of this world. He goes on: Sleeping, one does not see anything,
but seeing itself (or rather the faculty of seeing) goes on being a faculty of
the eternal subject which' in sleep does not practically see, because there is
no object to be seen. The same holds true for all the other faculties-of
smelling, tasting, speaking, hearing, thinking, touching and recognizing. When
the subject in this way stands alone without an object, it is in the stage of
the brahman-world, the highest bliss
(ib. 23-33). Here again the idealism
of Yajnavalkya is obvious: In sleep not only the subjective activities and
characters of men disappear but also the objective world and the Vedas; of
course they are extinct for the sleeping man only, but Yajnavalkya omits to
make this restriction clear. Idealism is quite overt in Yajnavalkya's views of
the eternal soul as eternally seeing etc. Here again one observes the
idealistic escapism of Yajnavalkya, for whom the highest bliss is to be free
from this world, a point totally absent in Uddalaka’s materialism.
3. Mind
This materialism is further
expressed in Uddalaka's doctrine that mind is becoming out of food just as
breath (life) out of water and speech out of fire (Ch. Up. vi. 5). It was common among the old thinkers to identify
speech with fire and breath (life) with water. But to claim that mind is food
was something stupendous. It was the climax of this text of Uddalaka teaching
his son Svetaketu (Ch. Up. vi. 1-7) and he felt the
necessity to prove this thesis. Therefore, he used the churrning of milk as
analogy to human digestion: just as milk is separated in three parts, food
becomes threefold-its finest parts become mind, the middle ones flesh, the
coarsest ones excrements. And finally he made his son undergo the experiment of
fasting in order to show that drinking water keeps him alive but avoiding food
makes him lose his thinking (rather memory). When he eats again, his knowledge,
his mind, comes back, as we would say, or his mind is recreated by food, as Uddalaka
taught. This conception reminds us of the later Samkhy ideas according to which
buddhi is the first product of prakrti. But in Samkhya buddhi works only in connection with
soul (purusa), while in Uddalaka's
materialism there is no purusa, no
eternal soul as the ultimate and only subject.
Yajnavalkya, on the other hand,
identified atman with brahman and mind, breath, seeing,
hearing, earth, water, wind, etc. (Br.
Up. iv. 3, 5) in concordance with his radical idealism, according to which
the spiritual soul is the ultimate reality. He agreed in this respect with
Samkhya who declared brahman to
consist of mind (Ch. Up. iii. 14, 2),
with Satyakama who identified one sixteenth of brahman with mind (Ch. Up.
iv. 8, 3) or mind with brahman,
as Yajnavalkya quoted him (Br Up. iv. 1,6)
and with the anonymous idealist of Ch. Up. iii. 18, 1. On another occasion Yajnavalkya
taught that the mind of a dying man went to the moon (Br. Up. iii. 2, 13) in agreement with the teaching of one of the
breath-wind magician in Br. Up. i. 3, 16.
Perhaps Yajnavalkya in this context understood mind as the material base of
thinking in the body. At all events he once stressed the point that there is
inside mind the real subject, the antaryamin,
who is governing not only mind but also breath, speech, seeing, hearing,
knowing, semen, earth, water, fire, air, wind, heaven, sun moon, stars, all
beings, in short, the whole world (Br Up.
iii. 7, 3 seq.). This subject is the unseen seer, the unthought thinker,
i.e. the absolute subject, the only thinker besides whom there is no other
thinker. Yajnavalkya confessed that this ultimate subject cannot be recognized.
Quite in contrast to Uddalaka he did not strive to prove the existence and
power 'of this spiritual subject. And, it is remarkable that he described this
subject just in his discussion with Uddalaka who had heard of such a 'governor
of the whole world from inside' from a demon who had taken possession of a
woman. Uddalaka listened to the unproved description of this antaryamin which was in sharp contrast
to his own hylozoistic conception of mind being created out of matter in the
form of food, and he kept silent at the end. The author, an idealist of this
discussion, did not dare to make Uddalaka accept this idealistic religious
doctrine of Yajnavalkya, but he avoided also to maintain Uddalaka’s repudiation
of it.
In his discussion with Usasta,
one of the breath wind magicians, Yajnavalkya also referred to this unknowable
subject: You cannot think tile thinker of the thinking (Br.Up. 4, 2.) and he called this unknowable subject the aksaram (ib. 8, 11) which is atman-brahman.
Knowing (of the supreme existence of) this innermost atman, real Brahmins give
up all desire for practical success, reach childhood beyond all learning and
become silent (Br. Up. iii. 5). In
this way Yajnavalkya connects his agnostic doctrine of the ultimate reality of
this only and unthinkable subject with his highest goal of world-detesting
pessimism which stands in contrast to Uddalaka's materialism.
4. Monism.
Uddalaka wants to teach his pupil
the one real which, being known, makes everything known, and this reality is
the sat. He illustrates this monism with the examples of clay which being known
make -all pots known, of copper and iron which being known make all products of
these metals known. Knowledge of matter, of sat, is the goal of this materialistic
monism. As proof he gives illustrations from well-known handicrafts in Indian
villages (Ch. Up. vi. 1).
Yajnavalkya, on the other hand,
when he taught his beloved Maitreyi, declared that the main object of his philosophy
was atman. By seeing, hearing,
thinking and understanding atman all
is known (B[. Up. iv. 5, 6). Everything, the Brahmin-caste, the Ksatriya-caste,
the worlds, the gods, the Vedas, all beings are in atman. Just as when a drum is beaten, the drum might be grasped but
not the sounds outside the drum, in the same way the atman should be grasped
and then all the worlds, gods, Vedas, beings, etc. are grasped. The conch-shell
and the sounds resulting from its blowing, and the vina and her sounds are other examples given by Yajnavalkya in
this connection, being three altogether, just as Uddalaka had given three
illustrations for his monism (Br. Up. iv.
5, 8-10).
Here again the idealism of Yajnavalkya
stands in contrast to the materialism of Uddalaka. The illustration of clay,
copper and iron is easily understood; but that of the sounds is strange. What
the average man sees, observes and knows is the objective world (which
corresponds to the sounds), and Yajnavalkya has himself on several occasions
pointed out that it is impossible to know, see, hear etc. the ultimate
subject, the atman-brahman (which
corresponds to the drum etc.). But here he pretends that knowledge of the atman makes all the world known.
Uddalaka so understood his
materialistic monism that he was not satisfied in maintaining only that it is
sufficient to know sat the ultimate material; he moreover worked hard to teach
his pupil how primary matter became the objective world of sun, moon, lightning
and fire, of all the different things with their names and forms, of the human
body, breath, mind etc.; how sleep, hunger, thirst and even an ordeal and
teaching worked. In short he taught an encyclopedic materialistic monism.
Yajnavalkya, on the other hand,
turned again and again to atman-brahman
although he knew that it was impossible to know it. When asked, he could answer
to a lot of questions as regards the phenomena of the world, but his main
interest was, in contrast to Uddalaka, not to explain the becoming of the world
but to become free from the world.
Correspondingly Uddalaka
maintained that the world, being nothing else than a transformation of sat, was eternal and the sat could not develop out of an asat, because this was unthinkable (Ch. Up. vi. 2, 2). Today we would
formulate: sat is according to definition being, not becoming out of something
else, out of asat.
Yajnavalkya maintained quite the
same as regards atman. He is eternal,
he is born without a birth in a samsara,
without any beginning and even in so called rebirth he cannot be born again (B
r. Up. iii.). Reborn is atman only
insofar as he received a new body. The progressive modern scientist agrees with
Uddalaka that matter is eternal, without beginning and always changing its
form. But he cannot understand Yajnavalkya who teaches religion rather than
scientific philosophy.
Uddalaka in his philosophy does
not deal with problems of rebirth, of an eternal soul, karman or moksa. With
scholarly observation and understandable examples: he tries to convince his
pupil to accept his materialistic hylozoist monism, quite in contrast to Yajnavalkya's
idealism which is founded on introspection and the tradition of shamanism which
was certainly living in prehistoric India and developed into yoga. Thus, it is possible to show the
fundamental difference between the materialism of Uddalaka and the idealism of
Yajnavalkya, but insofar as hylozoism to a great extent looks similar to
pantheism, the redactors of the Chandogyopanisat
accepted this materialistic philosophy into their idealistic-religious text-book
and preserved this highly valuable document of old thinking.
