Hello dear listeners, and welcome back to the Religions of the World podcast. I’m your host Yuguan Xing, and today we’re going to continue our exploration of Hinduism.
In the last episode we introduced the oldest collection of Hindu scripture, the Vedas, focusing primarily on the Rigveda, which is the oldest among the four Vedas. We introduced the Samhitas section of the Vedas, which is a collection of hymns, and spent some time talking about Indra the god of thunder, and Agni the god of fire. We ended with an exploration of the Vedic view that different deities are no more than different aspects or representations of the same supreme being.
You might remember that I said the Samhitas is one out of four parts of the Rigveda. In fact, all four Vedas are organized in the same way. Every one of them is divided into four parts, with the Samhitas being one of them. The other three parts are the Brahmanas, which are instructions on how to conduct rituals, the Aranyakas, which are discussions on the meanings behind these rituals, and finally the Upanishads, which is our topic for this episode. I know that what I just said is probably a bit hard to understand without visual aid, so let me reiterate. There are four Vedas, and each Veda consists of four parts, called the Samhitas, the Brahmanas, the Aranyakas, and the Upanishads. That gives us a total of 16 parts of the Vedic literature.
But for our purpose you don’t really need to remember how the Vedas are structured, much less what each part is called. But please, please do remember the Upanishads. They are philosophical texts that are arguably the most intellectually stimulating material that Hinduism contributed to humanity. It’s also extremely influential. Ideas laid out in the Upanishads have dictated the Hindu way of life for thousands of years, but they reached far beyond that. Some of these ideas also became the basis of Buddhism, which diffused beyond the Indian subcontinent and shaped the thoughts and actions of hundreds of millions of people spread across the world. The Upanishads have also influenced the thoughts of some western philosophers. The most famous example is the German philosopher Schopenhauer, who praised the Upanishads as being “the production of the highest human wisdom”.
There are two interpretations of what the name “Upanishads” means. Some translate it as “sitting near someone”, which apparently refers to the process of students sitting near their teachers to learn these texts. Another common translation is “secret knowledge”, which illustrates the depth of the Upanishads, and implies that only those who are prepared can acquire the wisdom within. In either case, the name lays out the fact that the content of the Upanishads requires strenuous study to understand. This is very true since the Upanishads are mostly texts containing philosophical teachings of an abstract nature.
The Upanishads is the part that was formed the latest within the Vedic literature. They are also referred to as the Vedanta, which literally means “end of the Vedas”. They are called that because 1. Like I just said, they are formed the latest, so chronologically they are the last parts and 2. People consider them to be the summarization and proper closure of the Vedas. A large part of the Vedas have become somewhat obsolete in the day to day life of an ordinary Hindu today. For example, Indra and Agni are no longer popular targets of worship, but the ideas that the Upanishads have established is still very much relevant today, even if not everyone has actually read the texts themselves.
In a nutshell, the Upanishads can be seen as an answer to one of the central questions of philosophy, that is, is there a reality outside the world that we experience?
Throughout human intellectual history, people from different cultures around the world raised this very question independently, and have been trying to come up with an answer to it for thousands of years. Let me give you a couple of examples to illustrate what this question is asking.
In ancient China, around the 4th Century BCE, there was a philosopher named Zhuang Zhou. In his writings, he told the story of a weird dream that he had. In the dream, he was a butterfly. It’s not that he dreamed of himself turning into a butterfly. But rather, he was a butterfly all along. In the dream, he didn’t remember anything about this guy named Zhuang Zhou. He was just flapping his wings, eating honey from flowers, and doing butterfly things. Then he woke up and realized that he was not a butterfly, but was actually a human being named Zhuang Zhou. But then he thought, in the dream I never doubted that I was a butterfly, so even though right now I’m convinced that I’m a human being, how do I know that this is not just another dream? The dream felt every bit as real when I was in it. How do I know that at this moment I’m not a butterfly having a dream about being a human being? How do I know that what I am experiencing right now is real?
The most famous western example of a formulation of this question about a reality outside our experience comes from the 17th Century French philosopher Descartes. He told us to imagine there being a powerful evil demon, who’s using all his power in order to deceive you. Everything that you see, hear, smell, taste, or feel with your hands, might just be an illusion that this demon has induced in you. In reality, you might not even have eyes, ears, nose, mouth or hands. There is just no way for us to tell for sure that what we think is real, is real.
Now that we have understood what the question is, let’s turn back to the Upanishads and see what answer it has given. A quick word here: the upanishads is an immense body of text composed over a long period of time, written by many many different authors. As a result, It’s notoriously inconsistent in many subjects that it discusses, and there are various schools of thoughts with very different interpretations. What I am going to introduce is the thoughts of Advaita Vedanta, one of the most prominent and influential schools of Hindu thoughts.
There are two central concepts to the Upanishads. The first one is called Brahman. Brahman is the ultimate reality, the first principle of the universe, the absolute, the ground of being. This notion of an absolute principle is very common in religious and philosophical traditions around the world, but since this is the first time that we bring it up in this podcast, let me use an analogy to make this concept clear. In ancient Greece, a lot of philosophers wanted to find a principle, a basic building block of every matter and phenomenon in nature. They used the term arche to refer to this basic principle, and arche is the etymological source of the English word archetype. A philosopher named Thales argued that water is the arche. Another philosopher, Empodocles, claimed that tetrad of earth, water, air and fire is the arche. But more interestingly, yet another philosopher by the name of Democritus, hypothesised that all the matter that we see in nature consists of indivisible and unchanging particles which he called atoms. You heard me right, modern scientists use the term atom to call what they thought is the indivisible building block of everything in the universe as a nod to Democritus. We now know that atoms themselves are not indivisible, but for simplicity, let’s just pretend that they are for a second. Tables, chairs, cups, clouds, grass, trees, everything before your eyes are just these minuscule particles aligned in a certain way. You, my dear listener, are no different. At the end of the day you’re just another pile of atoms. Rain falling from the sky, flowers blooming in the spring, leaves falling in the autumn, people growing old, all these changes, are just atoms moving around in a certain way. OK, what I’m trying to say is, Brahman, the concept of ultimate reality in the Upanishads, is kind of like atoms. Brahman is considered unknowable, just like how atoms are invisible to the human eye. Brahman is unchanging and eternal, just like how atoms underlie the changes that we experience, but don’t undergo any changes themselves. Brahman is the ground of being, just like how atoms make up everything that we know. When we were talking about atoms, you might have been visualizing them as little spheres. Now stop that visualization, and give up on trying to imagine them in any shape or form. Once you’ve done that, you’re getting pretty close to what the concept of Brahman is like. It is the arche of the universe.
So that was Brahman, the first one of the two central concepts of the Upanishads. The other one is called Atman. It means the self, the essence that defines the existence of an individual. Some interpretations equate atman with the soul, but it is actually one layer below that. It has nothing to do with your senses, your cognition, or your emotions. Atman doesn’t see or hear, it isn’t clever or stupid, it’s not happy or sad. It just is. Let’s imagine that there is someone named Jack who one day goes into a coma due to an accident. He has lost his senses, he no longer has the ability to reason, and he doesn’t feel any emotion either. But he is still Jack. And in the Upanishadic system, it is the Atman that sustains who he is through the changes.
Now that we have introduced the two core concepts of the Upanishads, the Brahman, which is the first principle of the universe, and the Atman, which is the self, the central idea of the Upanishads can be summarized in a very succinct way, that is, Atman equals Brahman. In other words, I am identical to the ultimate reality. In order to understand this, let’s bring back the analogy of atoms. We know that everything in the universe is just composed of atoms, including myself. Atoms permeate all existence, as it constitutes my existence. I am atoms. The atman is identical to Brahman. I have to admit that this is a huge oversimplification of what the doctrine means, but that’s as deep as we can go into, in this format. For a more in depth discussion, I recommend a book called The Philosophy of the Upanishads by the German scholar Paul Deussen.
OK, moving on. The Upanishads consider the world that we experience and observe, in other worlds, the phenomenal world, to be an illusion, or in Sanskrit, maya. The only reality is Brahman, which is identical to Atman. To help us understand this radical idea, let’s go back to the atoms analogy again. Everything that you see are just atoms organized in certain patterns, so how can you say something exists? For example, how can you say a chair exists? Assuming that a chair exists, and imagine that you take away atoms from a chair, one at a time, in the most careful way possible, it is unlikely that the chair would suddenly cease to exist upon removal of any particular atom. But if you continue removing atoms one at a time, obviously eventually nothing would remain of the chair. This creates a logical contradiction that can only be resolved if we accept that the premise that the chair existed in the first place, is wrong. This is a variation of an argument given by the contemporary philosopher Peter Unger to demonstrate that ordinary objects do not exist. As with every philosophical argument, there are many counter-arguments against it. But on the surface at least, I think it sounds pretty legit! We just derived that ordinary objects don’t exist from the assumption that atoms are the ultimate reality, and maybe that makes it easier for you to understand what it means when the Upanishads say that the phenomenal world is just maya, or an illusion. It denies plurality, claiming that we perceive the world as manifold only because we lack the knowledge that Brahman is the sole universal principle, and that we are identical to it. Remember that I said earlier in this podcast that the Upanishads give an answer to the philosophical question ‘is there a reality outside the world that we experience“? The answer from the Upanishads is that not only is there a reality without, but it is the only reality there is. It is Brahman.
Another question that bothers people around the world since the beginning of time is what happens to the soul after death, and almost all major religions have an answer to it. Hinduism, is of course no exception. View on the afterlife is not fully established in the Upanishads, but some key ideas were definitely developed in them. Hindus believe that the soul would persist after death, and if the person had been virtuous in their life, the soul would enjoy bliss in a realm that’s very similar to the Christian concept of heaven. It would reside with the Vedic gods and especially with Indra the thunder god and king of gods. This part is pretty common, and has counterparts in many cultures. However, what comes next is truly unique and deeply profound. This is where one of the most well-known concepts of Hinduism, Karma, comes in. The word Karma literally means action or work. The Hindu view on Karma can be succinctly summarized as “You reap what you sow”. Every action that we take contributes to accumulation of positive or negative Karma, which have their consequences on this life and beyond. Throughout the time that souls reside in heaven, it is believed that the good Karma that they accumulated during their earthly lives would be gradually consumed. And once it has depleted, the souls would transmigrate and be reborn in a new form. The soul of a human being might enter the body of yet another human, or an animal, or even a plant. What was a dog in a former life might be reborn into a human. After another death, this process is repeated. What shape and form the soul assumes in this life is considered to be the result of Karma accumulated in all previous lives. The cycle goes on and on ad infinitum. This concept of transmigration of the soul is called Samsara.
To modern eyes, this world view would seem very optimistic. After all, the belief that no identity is preserved after death is probably the root of our existential dread. We sometimes feel a lack of purpose because we think that nothing will matter in the end. The meaning of everything that we do is going to be lost after we die. In contrast, if you believe in Samsara, then every action has a purpose, because you are eternal, and the Karma that results from an action is going to follow you eternally. It’s a good thing, right? However, it is striking that the Hindu view on Samsara is not positive at all. Instead, it is considered to be a kind of torment that one has to go through the cycle of death and rebirth again and again, fettered by the consequences of their deeds. The Hindus want liberation, or moksha from this cycle. According to the Upanishads, moksha can be realized simply by gaining the knowledge that the Brahman and Atman are identical. One point that I need to emphasize, however, is that moksha is not a new state that you enter by the realization of the identity between Brahman and Atman. It is not a result of this realization. The realization simply is moksha. The Upanishads claim that we are free from the beginning! Everything that troubles us, including samsara, and the laws of cause and effects, are just illusions. Let me use the atom analogy one last time to illustrate this point. If you fully realize that you are just a pile of atoms, then death would not trouble you since all that is you right now will still be there after you die. The idea that you might become a chair someday would not trouble you either since nothing has really changed from this point and that point in the future. Atoms are the only things that exist in any given point in time. Realizing this doesn’t bring you into a new state which you are not already in. The realization itself is liberation. It is moksha.
So that was a high level overview of the Upanishads, at a breakneck speed. What are your thoughts? If you’re like me when I first learned about the Upanishads, you might be surprised that the word ‘God“ hardly ever appears in our discussion. It is a telltale example of the fact that different from common conceptions, worship of deities is not a necessary component of religion. Rather, what really defines religion is the rumination of what’s external to our ordinary experiences, and discussions of its implications on how we should see the world and live our lives.
I am fully aware that the content of this episode is a little abstract, but it is too important to leave out if you want to fully understand Hinduism. However, rest assured since we’re gonna be talking about the two Hindu epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata in the next episode, which are full of fascinating characters and stories. Thank you for listening, and I’ll see you next time.