BY PROF. V. A. THIAGARAJAN, M.A.
(The Central College, Bangalore)
When Tagore speaks of tireless striving stretching
its arm toward perfection, and of the mind of man awakening into the heaven of
freedom, he is explaining to us his idea of culture. We may regard his concept
of culture as the integration and the coming to a head of all those impulses
and ideals which ennoble life, Culture is the quintessence of group
consciousness. The idea of culture may to a certain extent be modified by
external factors, such as the environment and the way in which a people earn
their living. But these influences, intellectual, social, and environmental,
should be regarded not as obstacles to progress but as directing forces, which
give the characteristic bent to man’s striving after perfection at different
ages.
If we should regard culture as the flowering of the
tree of life, we may regard personality as the fruit of it. Although the word
personality is derived from the Greek word persona, which means a mask
or covering for the face, it now comes to mean all those accepted impulse of an
individual which distinguish him from others. The man whose impulses are
scattered and chaotic is said to be lacking in personality, precisely because
he is not a symbol of the racial will. But he who realises the infinite worth
of the human soul, in all that he says and does, realizes in himself the worth
of human personality. He sets the standard of human achievement, and becomes a
light unto the ages. He is the visible embodiment of what the Upanishadic seers
speak of as Purnam.
In the personality of Yajnavalkya, as given to us
in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, we get the nearest human approximation
to this ideal of Purnam. Although we do not get a full length picture of
this fearless seeker after Truth, the few snapshots that we get of him are
sufficient to mark him as a being apart. These pictures not only bring out the
mar but also reveal to us the general life of the age, against the background of
the forest hermitages. They show to us various aspects of the philosopher, as
the intrepid disputer, the royal preceptor, and the loving husband who
preferred Truth to Beauty.
The scene of public disputation where Yajnavalkya
gains the reward of wisdom should be regarded as the intellectual counterpart
of a swayamvara, Yajnavalkya claims to be a lover of wealth and walks
away with the prize even before the contest begins. It may be that he wished to
draw the best out of his opponents. Or it may be that he allowed no false sense
of modesty to stand between him and his sense of ultimate reality. He knows
that he knows. It is this awareness of values in relation to the Infinite that
marks him out from the crowd of opponents. We should regard these opponents as
persons who have attained some amount of skill in dialectics, but they have
confounded professional skill with ultimate wisdom. That is because they have
confounded the means of living with the end of existence. It, is true that
their professional pursuits have brought them into fragmentary contact with the
Infinite, but they are lacking in that integral outlook which makes life itself
an expression of the Infinite. That is why their attitude of mind is either
ritualistic, as though life were a contract between man and God, or is guided
by a love of ghost lore, as though the disembodied are likely to know more of
God’s ways than the embodied. What they seek is comfort, with honour here and
hereafter. The most interesting of these disputants is Gargi, the learned lady
who tries to pin Yajnavalkya between the horns of a dilemma. In spite of their
limitations, they give to us the general background of Aryan culture, and it is
against this background of racial culture that the personality of Yajnavalkya
emerges.
Scripture says that the Supreme has entered all
bodies, from Hiranyagarbha to a clump of grass, but it remains merely other
people’s experience so long as it is not felt in the blood. If Yajnavalkya were
a mere encyclopedia of learning, he might have learnt as much as others knew,
but that would not have given him any kind of preeminence over others. His
superiority to others is due to the fact that he is temperamentally akin to the
writers of Scripture. To him the goal and the path are alike familiar. It is
this aspect of Yajnavalkya that is brought out in the scene of his conversation
with the king. The one is a prince among philosophers, the other is a
philosopher among princes. Both are interested in that which is life’s highest
good. The philosopher makes King Janaka recall all that he has heard on the
subject, and teaches him how to integrate all that in the light of life’s
experience.
Yajnavalkya teaches mankind how to integrate the
intellectual with the moral. There is a tendency to pursue either the
intellectual or the ethical, to the exclusion of the other. That was where
ancient civilisation split into the two great currents of thought: the Hellenic
and the Hebraic. But the purely intellectual attitude to life lacks force,
while the purely ethical lacks awareness. In either case, life becomes static.
Yajnavalkya’s attitude to life bridges the gulf between the intellectual and
the ethical. He shows to us that what is intellectually true is also ethically
good. Holiness becomes identical with wisdom. Yajnavalkya is the path-finder of
humanity, because he has assimilated in himself all the elements of racial
culture.
He who lacks self-integration cannot know the Self
as a whole. Yajnavalkya’s recognition of the infinite worth of the human soul
is itself the sign of a well-developed personality. He has realised that the
awareness of the Self is man’s dearest possession, but he excels himself by
renouncing all for the sake of this Self, the summum bonum of life.
There is a time to gain the good things of life. There is a time to give them
up. In the first instance, man shows his mastery of the environment. In the
second: instance, he shows his mastery of himself. The philosophy which
Yajnavalkya preached taught him to renounce all for the sake of the Self. The
two scenes which the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad gives us of his discourses
with Maitreyi should be regarded as the supreme test of his life. Although
these two scenes form together a single unit, they come far apart in the
Upanishad. Perhaps the first scene represents that period of his life when he
was held in the pleasing bondage of the rose-mesh of life. What a man chooses
out of two nearly alike good things is a test of his personality. On the human
plane, Maitreyi is dear to him. But to the truth-seeker, truth is even more
dear. Like a skilful musician calling out the sleeping spirit of song, Maitreyi
calls out, in language rich with emotional eloquence, his living concept of
what is Purnam, and his renunciation of Maitreyi and of secular life
should be regarded as a supreme sign of his love of the Eternal which he finds
in Maitreyi herself. In the very act of renouncing, he stands out preeminent is
the supreme lover.
Let us therefore, salute the great sage who is a
symbol of what India once was, and may yet be.