| |
This translation of a few of the simpler and more exoteric Upanishads
to be followed by other sacred and philosophical writings of the Hindus
not included in the Revealed Scriptures, all under the one title of
the Book of God, has been effected on one definite and unvarying
principle, to present to England and through England to Europe the religious
message of India only in those parts of her written thought which the
West is fit to hear and to present these in such a form as should be
attractive and suggestive to the Occidental intellect. The first branch
of this principle necessitated a rigid selection on definite lines,
the second dictated the choice of a style and method of rendering which
should be literary rather than literal.
The series of translations called the Sacred Books of the East, edited
by the late Professor Max Müller, was executed in a scholastic
and peculiar spirit. Professor Max Müller, a scholar of wide attainments,
great versatility and a refreshingly active, ingenious and irresponsible
fancy, has won considerable respect in India by his attachment to Vedic
studies, but it must fairly be recognised that he was more of a grammarian
and philologist, than a sound Sanskrit scholar. He could construe Sanskrit
well enough, but he could not feel the language or realise the spirit
behind the letter. Accordingly he committed two serious errors of judgment;
he imagined that by sitting in Oxford and evolving new meanings out
of his own brilliant fancy he could understand the Upanishads better
than Shankaracharya or any other Hindu of parts and learning; and he
also imagined that what was important for Europe to know about the Upanishads
was what he and other European scholars considered they ought to mean.
This, however, is a matter of no importance to anybody but the scholars
themselves. What it is really important for Europe to know is in the
first place what the Upanishads really do mean, so far as their exoteric
teaching extends, and in a less degree what philosophic Hinduism took
them to mean. The latter knowledge may be gathered from the commentaries
of Shankaracharya and other philosophers which may be studied in the
original or in their translations which the Dravidian Presidency, ignorantly
called benighted by the materialists, has been issuing with a truly
noble learning and high-minded enterprise. The former this book makes
some attempt to convey.
But it may be asked, why these particular Upanishads alone, when there
are so many others far larger in plan and of a not inferior importance?
In answer I may quote a sentence from Professor Max Müller's Preface
to the Sacred Books of the East. “I confess,” he says,
“it has been for many years a problem to me, aye, and to a great
extent is so still, how the Sacred Books of the East should,
by the side of so much that is fresh, natural, simple, beautiful and
true, contain so much that is not only unmeaning, artificial and silly,
but even hideous and repellent.” Now, I myself being only a poor
coarse-minded Oriental and therefore not disposed to deny the gross
physical facts of life and nature or able to see why we should scuttle
them out of sight and put on a smug, respectable expression which suggests
while it affects to hide their existence, this perhaps is the reason
why I am somewhat at a loss to imagine what the Professor found in the
Upanishads that is hideous and repellent. Still I was brought up almost
from my infancy in England and received an English education, so that
I have glimmerings. But as to what he intends by the unmeaning, artificial
and silly elements, there can be no doubt. Everything is unmeaning in
the Upanishads which the Europeans cannot understand, everything is
artificial which does not come within the circle of their mental experience
and everything is silly which is not explicable by European science
and wisdom. Now this attitude is almost inevitable on the part of an
European, for we all judge according to our lights and those who keep
their minds really open, who can realise that there may be lights which
are not theirs and yet as illuminating or more illuminating than theirs,
are in any nation a very small handful. For the most part men are the
slaves of their associations.
Let us suppose that the ceremonies and services of the Roman Catholic
Church were not mere ceremonies and formularies, borrowed for the most
part from Eastern occultisms without understanding them, - that they
had been arranged so as to be perfect symbols of certain deep metaphysical
truths and to produce certain effects spiritual and material according
to a scientific knowledge of the power of sound over both mind and matter;
let us suppose that deep philosophical works had been written in the
terminology of these symbols and often in a veiled allusive language;
and let us suppose finally that these were translated into Bengali or
Hindustani and presented to an educated Pundit who had studied both
at Calcutta and at Nuddia or Benares, what would he make of them? It
will be as well to take a concrete instance. Jesus Christ was a great
thinker, a man who had caught, apparently by his unaided power, though
this is not certain, something of the divine knowledge, but the writers
who recorded his sayings were for the most part ordinary men of a very
narrow culture and scope of thought and they seem grossly to have misunderstood
his deepest sayings. For instance, when he said “I and my Father
are one”, expressing the deep truth that the human self and the
divine self are identical, they imagined that he was setting up an individual
claim to be God; hence the extraordinary legend of the Virgin Mary and
all that followed from it. Well, we all know the story of the Last Supper
and Jesus' marvellously pregnant utterance as he broke the bread and
gave of the wine to his disciples “This is my body and this is
my blood”, and the remarkable rite of the Eucharist and the doctrine
of Transubstantiation which the Roman Catholic Church have founded upon
it. “Corruption! superstition! blasphemous nonsense!” cries
the Protestant, “Only a vivid Oriental metaphor and nothing more.”
If so, it was certainly an “unmeaning, artificial and silly”
metaphor, nay, “even a hideous and repellent” one. But I prefer
to believe that Jesus' words had always a meaning, generally a true
and beautiful one. On the other hand, the Transubstantiation doctrine
is one which the Catholics themselves do not understand, it is to them
a “mystery”. And yet how plain the meaning is to the Oriental
intelligence! The plasm of matter, the food-sheath of the universe to
which bread and wine belong, is rendered the blood and body of God and
typifies the great primal sacrifice by which God crucified himself so
that the world might exist. The Infinite had to become finite, the Unconditioned
to condition himself, Spirit to evolve Matter. In the bread and the
wine which the communicant eats, God actually is, but he is not present
to our consciousness, and he only becomes so present (here to our consciousness)
by an act of faith; this is the whole doctrine of Transubstantiation.
For, as the Upanishad says, we must believe in God before we can know
him; we must realise him as the “He is” before we realise
him in his essential. And indeed if the child had not believed in what
his teacher or his book told him, how could the grown man know anything?
But if a deep philosophical work were written on the Eucharist hinting
at great truths but always using the symbol of the bread and wine and
making its terminology from the symbol and from the doctrine of Transubstantiation
based upon the symbol, what would our Hindu Pundit make of it? Being
a scholar and philosopher, he would find there undoubtedly much that
was “fresh, natural, simple, beautiful and true” but also
a great deal that was “unmeaning, artificial and silly” and
to his vegetarian imagination “even hideous and repellent”.
As for the symbol itself, its probable effect on the poor vegetarian
would be to make him vomit. “What hideous nonsense,” says
the Protestant, “we are to believe that we are eating God!”
How shall such an one know of Him where He abideth?
Many of the Upanishads similarly are written round symbols and in a
phraseology and figures which have or had once a deep meaning and a
sacred association to the Hindus but must be unintelligible and repellent
to the European. What possible use can be served by presenting to Europe
such works as the Chhandogya or Aitareya Upanishad in which even the
majority of Hindus find it difficult or impossible to penetrate every
symbol to its underlying truth? Only the few Upanishads have been selected
which contain the kernel of the matter in the least technical and most
poetical form; the one exception is the Upanishad of the Questions which
will be necessarily strange and not quite penetrable to the European
mind. It was, however, necessary to include it for the sake of a due
presentation of Upanishad philosophy in some of its details as well
as in its main ideas, and its technical element has a more universal
appeal than that of the Chhandogya and Aitareya.
An objection may be urged to the method of translation that has been
adopted. Professor Max Müller in his translation did not make any
attempt to render into English the precise shades of Aryan philosophical
terms like Atman and Prana which do not correspond to
any philosophical conception familiar to the West; he believed that
the very unfamiliarity of the terms he used, to translate them, would
be like a bracing splash of cold water to the mind forcing it to rouse
itself and think. In this I think the Professor was in error; his proposition
may be true of undaunted philosophical intellects such as Schopenhauer's
or of those who are already somewhat familiar with the Sanskrit language,
but to the ordinary reader the unfamiliar and unexplained terminology
forms a high and thick hedge of brambles shutting him off from the noble
palace and beautiful gardens of the Upanishads. Moreover, the result
of a scholastic faithfulness to the letter has been to make the style
of the translation intolerably uncouth and unworthy of these great religious
poems. I do not say that this translation is worthy of them, for in
no other human tongue than Sanskrit is such grandeur and beauty possible.
But there are ways and their degrees. For instance, etad vai tat,
the refrain of the Katha Upanishad has a deep and solemn ring in
Sanskrit because etad and tat so used have in Sanskrit
a profound and grandiose philosophical signification which everybody
at once feels; but in English “This truly is that” can be
nothing but a juggling with demonstrative pronouns; it renders more
nearly both rhythm and meaning to translate “This is the God of
your seeking”, however inadequate such a translation may be.
It may, however, fairly be said that a version managed on these lines
cannot give a precise and accurate idea of the meaning. It is misleading
to translate Prana sometimes by life, sometimes by breath, sometimes
by life-breath or breath of life, because breath and life are merely
subordinate aspects of the Prana. Atman again rendered
indifferently by soul, spirit and self, must mislead, because what the
West calls the soul is really the Atman yoked with mind and intelligence,
and spirit is a word of variable connotation often synonymous with soul;
even self cannot be used precisely in that way in English. Again the
Hindu idea of “immortality” is different from the European;
it implies not life after death, but freedom from both life and death;
for what we call life is after all impossible without death. Similarly
Being does not render purusha, nor “matter”
rayi, nor askesis the whole idea of tapas. To a certain
extent all this may be admitted, but at the same time I do not think
that any reader who can think and feel will be seriously misled, and
at any rate he will catch more of the meaning from imperfect English
substitutes than from Sanskrit terms which will be a blank to his intelligence.
The mind of man demands, and the demand is legitimate, that new ideas
shall be presented to him in words which convey to him some associations
with which he will not feel like a foreigner in a strange country where
no one knows his language, nor he theirs. The new must be presented
to him in the terms of the old; new wine must be put to some extent
in old bottles. What is the use of avoiding the word “God”
and speaking always of the Supreme as “It” simply because
the Sanskrit usually, - but not, be it observed, invariably, - employs
the neuter gender? The neuter in Sanskrit applies not only to what is
inanimate, not only to what is below gender but to what is above gender.
In English this is not the ease. The use of “It” may therefore
lead to far more serious misconceptions than to use the term “God”
and the pronoun “He”. When Matthew Arnold said that God was
a stream of tendency making towards righteousness, men naturally scoffed
because it seemed to turn God into an inanimate force; yet surely such
was not Arnold's meaning. On the other side, if the new ideas are presented
with force and power, a reader of intelligence will soon come to understand
that something different is meant by “God” from what ideas
he attaches to that word. And in the meanwhile we gain this distinct
advantage that he has not been repelled at the outset by what would
naturally seem to him bizarre, repulsive or irreverent.
It is true, however, that this translation will not convey a precise,
full and categorical knowledge of the truths which underlie the Upanishads.
To convey such knowledge is not the object of this translation, neither
was it the object of the Upanishads themselves. It must always be remembered
that these great treatises are simply the gate of the Higher Knowledge;
there is much that lies behind the gate. Sri Krishna has indeed said
that the knowledge in the Vedas is sufficient for a holy mind that is
capable of knowing God, just as the water in a well is sufficient for
a man's purpose though there may be whole floods of water all around.
But this does not apply to ordinary men. The ordinary man who wishes
to reach God through knowledge, must undergo an elaborate training.
He must begin by becoming absolutely pure, he must cleanse thoroughly
his body, his heart and his intellect, he must get himself a new heart
and be born again; for only the twice-born can understand or teach the
Vedas. When he has done this he needs yet four things before he can
succeed, the Shruti or recorded revelation, the Sacred Teacher, the
practice of Yoga and the Grace of God. The business of the Shruti and
especially of the Upanishads is to seize the mind and draw it into a
magic circle, to accustom it to the thoughts and aspirations of God
(after the Supreme), to bathe it in certain ideas, surround it with
a certain spiritual atmosphere; for this purpose it plunges and rolls
the mind over and over in an ocean of marvellous sound through which
a certain train of associations goes ever rolling. In other words it
appeals through the intellect, the ear and the imagination to the soul.
The purpose of the Upanishad cannot therefore be served by a translation;
a translation at best prepares him for and attracts him to the original.
But even when he has steeped himself in the original, he may have understood
what the Upanishad suggested, but he has not understood all that it
implies, the great mass of religious truth that lies behind, of which
the Upanishad is but a hint or an echo. For this he must go to the Teacher.
“Awake ye, arise and learn of God, seeking out the Best who have
the knowledge.” Hard is it in these days to find the Best, for
the Best do not come to us, we have to show our sincerity, patience
and perseverance by seeking them. And when we have heard the whole of
the Brahmavidya from the Teacher, we still know of God by theory only;
we must further learn from a preceptor the practical knowledge of God,
the vision of Him and attainment of Him which is Yoga and the goal of
Yoga. And even in that we cannot succeed unless we have the Grace of
God; for Yoga is beset with temptations not the least of which are the
powers it gives us, powers which the ignorant call supernatural. “Then
must a man be very vigilant for Yoga, as it hath a beginning, so hath
it an ending.” Only the Grace of God can keep us firm and help
us over the temptations. “The spirit is not to be won” etc...
- the blessing of triumphant self-mastery that comes from long and patient
accumulation of soul experience. Truly does the Upanishad say, “Sharp
as a razor's edge is the path, difficult and hard to traverse, say the
seers.” Fortunately it is not necessary and indeed it is not possible
for all to measure the whole journey in a single life, nor can we or
should we abandon our daily duties like the Buddha and flee into the
mountain or the forest. It is enough for us to make a beginning.
Sri Aurobindo
In SABCL, Volume 12 "The Upanishads"
pages 53-60
published by Sri
Aurobindo Ashram - Pondicherry
diffusion by SABDA
|
[ 
