anishads
themselves. To the Hindu commentator and philosopher the Upanishads came
down as a body of revealed truth whose teaching had, somehow or other,
to be shown to be thoroughly consistent and free from contradictions; a
system had to be devised in which a suitable place could be allotted to
every one of the multitudinous statements which they make on the various
points of Vedantic doctrine. But to the European scholar, or in fact to
any one whose mind is not bound by the doctrine of /S/ruti, it will
certainly appear that all such attempts stand self-condemned. If
anything is evident even on a cursory review of the Upanishads--and the
impression so created is only strengthened by a more careful
investigation--it is that they do not constitute a systematic whole.
They themselves, especially the older ones, give the most unmistakable
indications on that point. Not only are the doctrines expounded in the
different Upanishads ascribed to different teachers, but even the
separate sections of one and the same Upanishad are assigned to
different authorities. It would be superfluous to quote examples of what
a mere look at the Chandogya Upanishad, for instance, suffices to prove.
It is of course not impossible that even a multitude of teachers should
agree in imparting precisely the same doctrine; but in the case of the
Upanishads that is certainly not antecedently probable. For, in the
first place, the teachers who are credited with the doctrines of the
Upanishads manifestly belonged to different sections of Brahminical
society, to different Vedic /s/akhas; nay, some of them the tradition
makes out to have been kshattriyas. And, in the second place, the
period, whose mental activity is represented in the Upanishads, was a
creative one, and as such cannot be judged according to the analogy of
later periods of Indian philosophic development. The later philosophic
schools as, for instance, the one of which /S/a@nkara is the great
representative, were no longer free in their speculations, but strictly
bound by a traditional body of texts considered sacred, which could not
be changed or added to, but merely systematised and commented upon.
Hence the rigorous uniformity of doctrine characteristic of those
schools. But there had been a time when, what later writers received as
a sacred legacy, determining and confining the whole course of their
speculations, first sprang from the minds of creative thinkers not
fettered by the trad