BY Prof. V. A. THIAGARAJAN, M.A.
The higher criticism of the Bible is in the main
the product of eighteenth century rationalism. It abandoned the theory of the
verbal inspiration of the Bible. It insisted upon looking on the book of God as
a human document, subject to the limitations of the man, the race and its
cultural heritage. From Spinoza to Matthew Arnold, and from Matthew Arnold to
Samuel Butler, such an attitude to the Bible has saved it from becoming dogma,
and has rescued it as literature. As in the legend of Pygmalion, the subject of
reverence comes down from the pedestal, but gains fresh life.
It is always possible to take a similar attitude of
criticism towards the sacred literature of any country. The Upanishads
specially, which may be regarded as the wisdom books of the East, readily lend
themselves to such higher criticism. Traditional criticism has suffered from
certain well-marked limitations. At a time when books were scarce, and were
subject to the errors of scribes, the preservation of the correct text was a
matter of vital importance. Criticism paid as much attention to prefixes and
particles as to the central thought itself. Further, criticism had a definite
eye to the intellectual background of the seeker after truth, and it aimed at
either refuting a prepossession, or confirming a faith. All these have now
changed. Printing has achieved verbal correctness. The very lapse of time has
tended to take away the fire from many a burning controversy of the past. Only
their ashes have now been left behind.
The time has come to rescue the basic thoughts of
these wisdom books from the accretion of the ages, not for the purpose of
flinging anathemas at those who may differ from us, but for our own enlightenment.
It has been said by Shelley that a great poem is like a river to which the
generations come to slake their thirst. If we should accept his definition of a
poet as one who participates in the nature of the infinite and the eternal, and
of a poem as the best and happiest moments of the best and happiest of men, may
it not be that the gain is all on our side?
Let us illustrate our point of view by taking the Svetasvataropanishad
not as scripture, but as poetry, a jet of song, a fine free rapture of the
soul. On the formal side it is characterised pre-eminently by that witchery of
words which is inseparable from the idea of great poetry. On the intellectual
side, although the opening lines are in the nature of formal dialectics, the
schools of thought are left far behind. Metaphysics gives place to lyric
rapture. It becomes a spontaneous overflow of the spirit rejoicing in the
exercise of its creative faculty as it recreates the stuff of experience. The
writer leaves behind the trammels of the limited present, soars above into a
realm at higher harmony, in which the riddle of the world is solved as in
direct experience. That is why it is intensively lyrical in nature. It is the
concentrated and articulate expression of the liberated spirit, the kavi and
muni, to whom light and delight have become inseparable in a
contemplation of intellectual beauty. He sings, “I have realised this great
Being who shines effulgent like the Sun beyond all darkness.” (III, 8). He says
elsewhere, “I know this undecaying primaeval immanent self of all, who is
omnipresent because of his pervasiveness.” (III, 21). He follows the lyric
tradition of singing his own name along with the song of his composition,
although such a thing is rare in the more impersonal discoveries of the past.
It is not a mere subjective evaluation of life that
we get here. What we receive is the joy of the discoverer, the pleasure of the
explorer in the realm of the spirit. As in all lyric poetry, there is a change
of mood. It is at times lofty and triumphant at the joy of discovery, at times
tender and elegaic at the contemplation of the hard path to be trodden, as
though the sacrifice demanded is all but heavy. But at no time does the sense
of conviction waver. What the writer attempt is to translate the concept of the
Deity from a figure of speech into a figure of thought, and a fact of
experience. He lifts the veil and the bar of things which seem and are, and
brings us face to face with the immanent spirit. “He who is the one source of
the world, brings out everything out of His own Nature.” (V, 5). A theistic
concept as manifested in the universe is the theme of all his poetry. The
Eternal is also the indivisible. It is called the One merely as a concession to
the limitations of speech. What the writer gives to us is a perception of the
emergent values of the spirit in the forms that take the eye. It is at times
given to us in the form of a homely comparison. “As oil in sesame seeds, as
butter in curds, as water in underground springs, as fire in wood, even so this
Self is perceived in the self.” (I, 16).
Having succeeded in isolating and making palpable
to us the spirit-permeated ideal from the perishable and the transient, like a
scientist of the spirit who has isolated the self-luminous radium from a mass
of pitchblende, the poet sees in every manifestation of Nature the imperishable
divine reality, Hence his reverential approach to the forms of Nature which are
otherwise only a means of existence. “Salutation to the divinity who is in the
fire, who is in the water, who is in the plants, who is in the trees, who has
pervaded the whole universe.” (II, 17). What he perceives is the residual
value, the substance of life itself which is at once the bond of society and
the basis of morality, and which remains when all else are taken away.
In that vision of intellectual beauty which the
poet gives to us, the passion for truth is stronger than the love of beauty.
That is because he is more in love with the plastic stress of the spirit itself
than with the forms in which it manifests itself. It is with “the transcendent
and adorable Master of the universe” that he is in love. But what he gives to
us is nonetheless the poetry of joy in the widest commonalty spread. It is out
of the fullness of that joy that language bursts into song. Out of the inner
harmony of the individual spirit with the imperishable order of things, there
is born a new melody which synchronises with the very pulse beats of the
chanter. One catches at times a mild undertone of sadness, as though the sense
of joy is almost too much to be endured. It looks as though at times he felt
the burden of existence to be too much, as though he would more willingly have
sought the greater bliss of dissolution in the ineffable. All that he demands is
that he should be endowed with a sense of intellectual awareness, whether he is
at the beginning or at the end of the scheme of things. He sings, “May that
Divine Being who, though Himself colourless, gives rise to various colours in
different ways with the help of His own power, for His own inscrutable purpose,
and who dissolves the whole universe in Himself in the end–may He endow us with
good thoughts.” (IV, I). It may be mentioned in passing that the poet Tagore
seems to have been specially fond of this stanza, for on it he has based some
of his noblest utterances on death. Although the joy of the seer is something
gained in lofty moods of inspiration, a something given rather than a something
acquired, it seems to have been his abiding possession, for it is on it that he
has grounded the cessation of all illusion.
The final impression that is left on us is however
a dominant sense of peace. Calm of mind, all passion spent, one feels like
saying, “It is all very well.” The writer sings, “One attains infinite peace on
realising that self-effulgent adorable Lord, the bestower of blessings, who
though one, pervades over all the various aspects of Prakriti and in whom this
universe dissolves, and in whom it appears in manifold forms.” (IV, II.) And
again he sings, “One attains infinite peace when one realises that Blissful one
who creates the world in the midst of chaos, who assumes various forms, and who
is the only one that encompasses the universe.” (IV, 14).
The Svetasvataropanishad is not a mere
record of individual experience. It is a page in the book of life. It is a
record of racial experience. It is precisely because in it flows the Triveni
of the spirit–illumination, joy and peace–that it transforms existence into
a beatitude. We should approach it rather as a treasure house of racial
experience and as a precious heritage of mankind.
Matthew Arnold hoped that as time advanced mankind
would seek more and more in poetry the consolation and the stay of life which
it sought in religion. The Svetasvataropanishad is sublime poetry. To
those who approach it as poetry it throws open the portals of the house
beautiful, where there are no quarrels.