The Philosophy of Life

by Swami Krishnananda

Udayana, the great Naiyayika, offers the following orthodox proofs for the existence of God:

1. The world of perception is of the nature of an effect, and every effect must have a cause. We have to infer the cause of the world, as the world has a tendency to reduce itself to its elements. The composite parts get disintegrated and return to their causes, and the ultimate cause of all composite substances should be one that is above all effected things. And this cause must have a direct knowledge of the material causes of the world. Such an intelligent being must be God.
2. The conjunction of the causal elements into effects requires an intelligent operator. The combination of atoms into groups at the time of creation cannot but be the work of a purposive conscious being. The atoms do not combine pell-mell or at random. There is to be seen the hand of a wise organiser behind the systematic grouping of the ultimate atoms into dyads and molecules. That final organiser is God.
3. We observe that the things of the universe are well-supported; its parts, like the planets etc., are held together, so that they do not collapse. The holder of such different parts in balance, to constitute a system, must be God Himself, for nothing that is in the universe can support the universe.
4. The world is observed to dissolve itself into subtler causes. The dissolution of the effect into its cause means that there is a source into which the effect returns. The ultimate source of the universe, then, should be beyond the universe, and it is God.
5. No knowledge can come to us of the different things here, unless there is a source of this knowledge. The origin of all knowledge should be omniscient, and, consequently, omnipotent. Such a being is not to be seen in this universe, and so it must be outside it. This being is God.
6. The Vedas are held to be valid and authoritative from time immemorial. Such authoritativeness of the Vedas as true and valid knowledge cannot be without an author behind them, who ought to be an all-knower. This all-knower is God.
7. The Vedas cannot have any human author, because they deal with truths which no human being knows. Hence the author of the Vedas ought to be a superhuman being, and this being is God.
8. A sentence, as it is known to us in the world, has a composer who joins the words together and frames it. In like manner, the sentences of the Vedas consisting of words should have a composer, and he cannot be anyone else than God.
9. The size of a dyad or a molecule depends on the number of the atoms that go to constitute it. This requisite number of the atoms that go to form a particular compound could not have been originally the object of the perception of any human being; so its contemplator must be God. The Naiyayikas also add that the fruit of an individual’s actions does not always lie within the reach of the individual who is the agent. There ought to be, therefore, a dispenser of the fruits of actions, and this supreme dispenser is God.

The Yoga system of Patanjali considers God as the unsurpassed seed of omniscience. The possibility of the omniscience and the necessity to admit a source for it leads to the positing of a supreme Being who is unaffected by the changes characterised by affliction, action, fruition and the tendencies in keeping with such fruition. The knowledge which the different individuals are endowed with in this world is not of the same degree; there are grades in the manifestation of knowledge. There is an ascending degree of knowledge, power and happiness in accordance with the extent of the inclusiveness of the contents of knowledge. The greater the extent of the contents, the wider is the knowledge. The various degrees of knowledge in the world suggest a maximum ideal of knowledge, a state of omniscience which ought to be identified with eternal existence. Now this state of omniscience that is compatible with eternity cannot be found in any limited individual, for none here is seen to be all-wise. An omniscient being cannot be any individual, and he can be no other than God. God enjoys the highest perfection, being endowed with the greatest magnitude of knowledge and power. He alone can be omnipotent and be the Universal King.

The Nasadiya-Sukta of the Rig-Veda proclaims that at the beginning of things there was Tamas, darkness pervading everywhere, and in the midst of this universal darkness the Light of the One shone, all by itself. This glorious Intelligence is to be identified with the Self-born, Svayambhu, having no cause outside it. This Self-born emerged from the primordial Tamas, by means of its Tapas of untarnished knowledge, and projected this variegated world of individuals. “Darkness there was; in the beginning all this was a sea without light; the germ that lay covered by the husk, that One was born by the power of Tapas” (Rig-Veda, X. 129). The Rig-Veda extols the Hiranyagarbha as the first God of beings. “Hiranyagarbha was present in the beginning; when born, he was the sole lord of created beings; he upheld this earth and heaven,—to which God we offer worship with oblation. (To Him) who is the giver of soul-force, the giver of strength, who is contemplated by everything, whom even the gods obey, whose shadow is immortality as well as death,—to which God we offer worship with oblation” (X. 121). “With eyes everywhere, with faces everywhere, with hands everywhere, with feet everywhere, He traverses with His arms and with His swift-moving (feet), and exists as the One God, generating heaven and earth” (X. 81). “He who is our parent, the creator, the ordainer, who knows our abodes and all beings, who is the name-giver to the gods,—He is One; Him other beings come to inquire” (X. 82). The Purusha-Sukta refers to the great Lord as encompassing everything. “Thousand-headed was the Purusha, thousand-eyed and thousand-legged. He, covering the earth on all sides, stretched Himself beyond it by ten fingers’ length. All this is the Purusha alone, whatever was and whatever shall be… One-fourth of Him all beings are, three-fourth of Him is immortal in the heaven” (X. 90). The Absolute itself appears as Isvara. “From Him Virat was born, and from Virat, again, Purusha.” Isvara is the body as well as the soul of the world.

Following this great theme of the Veda, Manu, at the commencement of his code of law, states: “In the beginning all this was covered over by darkness, unknowable, indefinable, unarguable, indeterminable; the universe appeared to be in a state of sleep, as it were. Then, the Self-originated Divine Being, Himself unmanifested, manifested this universe with its great elements etc., by tearing the veil of this darkness and revealing the forms of His creative energy. He, who is not to be beheld by the senses, who is subtle, the unmanifest, the everlasting, the unthinkable, the very embodiment of all beings,—He, of Himself, rose above this primordial darkness” (Manu-Smriti, I. 5-7). The Srimad Bhagavata records the spirit of this doctrine in the words of the Lord Himself: “I alone was in the beginning of things, the one beyond the manifest as well as the unmanifest, and there was nothing else. And I alone shall be at the end of things. I alone am all this that is manifest; and whatever remains other than this, that also is I Myself alone” (II. ix. 32). The Lord speaks in the Bhagavad Gita: “I am the Vedic rite, I the sacrifice, I the food offered to the manes, I am the herbs and the medicines, I am the sacred formula and the hymn; I am the clarified butter (offered in sacrifices); I am the consecrated fire, I the oblation. I am the Father of this world, the Mother, Supporter, the Grandfather; I am the object to be known, I the purifier (of all things), the syllable OM, and also the sacred lore of the Rik, the Sama and the Yajus; the Goal, the Sustainer, the Lord, the Witness, the Abode, the Refuge, the Friend, the Origin, the Dissolution, the Basis, the Storehouse, the Imperishable Seed. I give heat, I sent forth rain, and also withhold it; I am immortality and also death; I am being and also non-being, O Arjuna!” (IX. 16-19). Isvara is described in the Gita as having manifested Himself here as the all-destroying Time.

The Limitations of Reason

The true nature of God and His creation cannot be intellectually comprehended, for logic is a proud child of the dualist prejudice. If God alone is all this world, the relation between Him and the world no mortal can hope to know. Man’s idea of God is highly defective, for God, as man understands Him, is relative to the appearance of the world. God is a pure subject opposed to a world of creation set before Him as an object cannot be absolute; and if He is not thus opposed, He ceases to have any external relation to the world. If God is a universal consciousness having the universe as His object, He cannot be connected with it except by a spatio-temporal knowledge. Such a knowing process, however, is inadmissible in the case of God, for He is said to be untouched by the vitiating divisions of space and time. But without this division, God cannot be distinguished from the Absolute which will not brook any objectivation of itself. The gulf between the infinite Purusha of the Sankhya and the Prakriti which vies with the former in almost every respect is an instance of the defeat which the human intellect has to suffer when it attempts to visualise a reality which is non-mediately related to the universe and yet is not the same as the universe. The God who is in man’s mind cannot be freed from the difficulty of having to melt down to undifferentiated being when His relation to the world is closely examined. Isvara’s existence happens to be relative to the demands of His self-manifesting work. He is, as long as the universe is.

Further, we cannot say that God created the world at any period of time. If the creative act is not in time, it being the condition even of time, there would be no creation of a temporal world. Creation is a process, and all process is in time. There is no process that can be dovetailed with eternity. To cause anything, God may have to descend into time, and a descent into time is a descent into finitude, change and a veritable self-destruction. If God is to bear any relation to phenomena, He has to shed His eternal nature first. But somehow He creates and sustains the world without losing His eternality. This the human intellect cannot understand. The Absolute sports in the relative. The individuals of the world arise as appearances participating in a relative interdependence of existence and nature. If there is no child, there is no parent, too. Isvara becomes an object of the notion of the Jiva, and a subject with the world as a predicate attached to it.

The logical character of truth and reality attributed to Isvara does not look consistent with our ascribing to Him the ethical character of goodness, the aesthetic character of beauty and the religious character of grace, all which carry an individualistic purport. If Isvara is the all, such values turn to be different from what they mean to us here in this world. And why has Isvara created the world? It cannot be for His satisfaction, for He has no wish or desire to fulfil. It cannot be with a view to dispensing justice or showing mercy to others, for there are no others, as all beings are subsequent to the creative act. It cannot be a play of Isvara, for play is normally supposed to be the result of a need felt within to direct outside the excess of energy in the psycho-physical organism, to overcome fatigue or boredom, or to replenish the system with fresh energy after an exhausting work. Isvara can have no such needs, for He is not an individual organism. If Isvara is only a witness of the sports of Prakriti which moves and acts at the inspiration received from His mere existence, He would have a determining element outside Him, which would prevent Him from being an absolute monarch. Isvara is Brahman envisaged by our experiential conditions in relation to a world of change. The question of creation is restricted to the world of the senses and the intellect, and the answer to it cannot but be empirically bound. There cannot be a correct answer to an erroneous question. That the world is, is a belief of ours, and the whole problem of creation hinges on how we react to our environment as dismembered bodies in a cosmic society.

The futility of the logical methods in determining the nature of Isvara does not imply, however, that there is no Intelligence underlying the world and influencing it throughout. For a denial of such a being would entail a denial of the world, and, consequently, our own selves as individuals. Certain inherent defects in our faculties of knowing prevent us from comprehending transcendent truths in a proper manner. It does not follow that the invisible is always non-existent. If we are, the world is; and if the world is, Isvara also is. If Isvara is not, the world also is not; and we as individuals, too, cannot be. There is reciprocal dependence of the existence of these three principles always. Our concepts are relative; the absolutely real is only Brahman. But as long as we accept our own existence as diversified elements in a world, a sovereign being giving meaning to life cannot be doubted. Our own conscious powers within us urge us to accept that Isvara must be. The scriptures corroborate our inner spiritual aspirations and extol an Isvara who is the creator of this world. Swami Sivananda countenances the Lila theory of creation, not with a view to offering it as any final explanation of the world, but to bringing out the idea that the creative act of Isvara is free from any taint of selfishness or ulterior motive, and to suggest that it is beyond the purview of the human mind. It is the nature of Isvara to create, to manifest and unfold the world; there is no other reason for it that is humanly conceivable. To show that Isvara has no personal interest whatsoever, it is also added that He only helps creation, which is really a manifestation or expression of the dormant potencies of the individuals who, not being liberated at the end of the previous cycle, existed in a latent form during the dissolution of the universe after that cycle. Rain may help the growth of a plant, but the nature of the plant depends on the seed from which it grows. The sun may help the activities of the world, but he remains unaffected by the results of such activities.

The theory of the creation of the world by Isvara is not to be taken as any statement of ultimate fact, but is meant to serve as a working hypothesis introduced to bring out the idea of the non-difference of the world from Brahman. Srishti or creation, and Pravesa or the entrance of Isvara into the world in His immanence, are Arthavadas or eulogical concepts intended to bring home to the mind of man the fact of the secondlessness of Brahman and the total dependence of the world on Brahman. No explanation of the why or the how of creation, and no concept of Isvara as the supreme Ruler of the world, can be finally satisfactory, for such statements and concepts are based on a false faith in the individuality of the self and the variety of the world of experience. But they are serviceable as a modus operandi in directing the individual from his ignorant prejudices of a bodily existence to the splendour of the Absolute. Isvara is sometimes said to be supreme Self-consciousness. But the Self-conscious Brahman would require something as an other-than-itself, at least space, to make such a condition possible. Brahman does not stand in need of knowing itself either as a subject or an object. But it has somehow to be related to the world. The result is Isvara. How such a relation is possible, the intellect is not fortunate enough to know. It calls this mystery ‘Maya’.