The term “vedānta,” end of the Veda, is a synonym of “upanishad.” Upanishad is said by the Indian scholiasts to denote, in the first place, the knowledge of the impersonal self, the science of absolute being, paramātmajnāna, brahmavidyā, in the second place, any treatise imparting that knowledge. The doctrines of the Upanishads constitute the jnānakānda, or gnostic portion of the Veda, as distinguished from the karmakānda, or ritual portion, comprised in the Samhitās and Brāhmanas. They constitute also the parāvidyā, or superior science, dealing with cessation from volition and action, and leading to extrication from metempsychosis, as distinguished from the aparāvidyā, or inferior science, of the Samhitās, Brāhmanas, and Vedāngas, which deals with action, and prolongs metempsychosis, leading only to higher embodiments in this world or in the paradises of the deities. The Vedanta philosophy is also called Aupanishadī Mīmānsā, Brāhmī Mīmānsā, Śārīrakī Mīmānsā. The Sūtras or mnemonic formulas in which the system is developed are the Vedāntasūtra, Brahmasūtra, and Śārīrakasūtra. They are ascribed to Vyāsa or Bādarāyana. The system is further styled the Uttaramīmānsā, as an investigation of the later portion of the Veda, as distinguished from the Pūrvamī-mānsā of Jaimini, which is an investigation of the earlier portion of the Veda. The purport of the Pūrvamīmānsā is dharmajijn ā s ā , inquiry into sacred prescription; the purport of the Uttaramīmānsā, or Vedanta, is brahmajijnāsā, inquiry into the real nature of the soul.

There is, according to the Vedānta, but one substance or reality, ingenerable, immutable, incorruptible, eternal, and this is the supreme spirit, the impersonal self, the spiritual absolute, ātman, paramātman, brahman. The series of bodies and of environments through which the soul appears to pass in its μετεvσωμάτωσιs are illusive, unreal, the figments of a fictitious illusion, māyā, prakriti, avyakta, avyākrita. The individual soul, jīvātman, vijnānātman, is personal only in fictitious semblance, only so long as it is implicated in the series of transmigratory states, and is in truth impersonal, one with the undifferenced self or Brahman. Its apparent and fictitious individuality, and its apparent action and suffering, are the individuality, the action, and the suffering of its illusory adjuncts, the organism and the faculties. The unity of all souls in the one soul is the highest truth, or, properly speaking, the only truth. On reaching and realizing this truth the individual soul returns to its isolation or state of pure indetermination. The duality of experience is fictitious and is surmounted by the true intuition, samyagjnāna. On the side of this intuition there abides only “the existent, the intelligence, the beatitude.”

Indian philosophy, and in particular its earliest form, the philosophy of the Upanishads, or Vedānta, is governed throughout by two needs. First, there is the need to give consistency and coherence to existing imagery, physical and hyperphysical, to work out a conception of the totality of things. Secondly, there is the need to put a stop to the miseries of metempsychosis. The idea of transmigration, foreign to the Indo-Aryans of the Vedic hymns, appears to have been taken up by their successors from the lower races with which they intermingled, while retaining their supremacy among them. The Indo-Aryans of the Vedic hymns found life pleasurable and exciting. They prayed to the gods for their hundred years of it, and for an after-life with the whole body. This view of life was replaced by one of horror and aversion, pervading everything Indian with its gloom,—the expectation of care, bereavement, sickness, pain, and death, in body after body, and through aeon after aeon.

The effort to work out a coherent and complete idea by means of some principle of unity appears in the following passages.

In the Mundaka Upanishad: “Śaunaka, the householder, approached Angiras and Said, ' Holy sir, by knowing what may all this universe be known ?’ Angiras replied, ‘Two sciences are to be known which they that transmit the Veda propound, a superior and an inferior science. Of these the inferior is the Rigυeda, Ac. The superior is that by which that undecaying being is attained. That which none can see, none can handle, which is without kindred, without colour, which has neither eyes nor ears, neither hands nor feet, which is imperishable, infinitely diversified, everywhere present, wholly imperceptible,—that is the immutable, that it is that sages behold as the source of all.’” In reference to this text the scholiast Ānandagiri says, “If we know the principium, the upā-dāna, of things, we shall know all things, inasmuch as all things have pre-existed in and are identical with their causes.” Śankarāchārya says: “In daily life things are known to ordinary people, if the unities are known under which those things are contained. For example, individual pieces of gold are known under the nature of gold. Thus the question of the text is, what is the one cause or emanatory principle of the diversity of the universe, which known everything else is known ?”

In the Chhāndogya Upanishad: “His father said to him, ‘ Svetaketu, thou art high-minded, wise in thy own conceit, and proud. Tell me, hast thou asked for that instruction by which the unheard is heard, the unthought thought, the unknown known? ’ He answered, ‘ How is that instruction given, sir? ’ His father said, ‘ Dear son, as by one lump of clay all that is made of clay becomes known, being a modification of speech only, a change, a name, and the clay being the only reality; as by one piece of iron all that is made of iron becomes known, being a modification of speech only, a change, a name, and the iron being the only reality; as by a pair of scissors all that is made of steel becomes known, being a modification of speech only, a change, a name, and the steel being the only reality :—such is the method of that instruction.’ Śvetaketu said, ‘ Sir, doubtless my teacher knew not that, for, had he known it, how could he have failed to tell me of it? Do thou therefore tell me of it.’ His father said, ‘ Be it so, my dear son. Existent only, fair youth, was this in the beginning, one only, without duality. Some indeed have said, non-existent only was this in the beginning, one only, without duality. From that non-existent the existent proceeded. But how could this be so? how could entity proceed out of non-entity? ’”

In the Śvetāśvatara Upanishad: “Those that proclaim Brahman say, What is the principium? Is it the impersonal self? From what have we proceeded into life? into what do we return? By what are we upheld as we pass through pleasures and pains? Is time the principium? Is the inherent property of things their principium? Is chance? Are the elements? Or is the individual soul the origin of all things? Or is the sum of these the principium? Neither is any one of these, nor are all of these, the principium, for it is the impersonal self. It is not the individual self, for that is not independent, being subject to pleasures and to pains.”

The most powerful incentive to speculation was the yearning to escape the miseries of transmigration. The soul has to pass through hunger and thirst, sorrow, bereavement, decrepitude, death, in body after body, through age after age. The individual soul has to look forward to continual suffering through a countless series of embodiments. The series is without beginning, and, until the individual learns his impersonal nature, without end. The series of transmigratory spheres is projected and retracted, projected and retracted, from before all time. Periods of evolution and of dissolution follow each other from and to eternity. Any intervals of pleasure in the series of states through which the soul passes are fugitive and unsatisfying. Even the pleasures of the paradises of the deities are tainted with the fear of their expiry, and with the inequalities amongst the participants. They also are part of the darkness in which everything appears to be involved.

The transmigratory series, or samsara, is said to consist of agents, actions, and fruits of action. The fruits of action are the bodies and the environments allotted according to good or evil works. It is described as an unbroken succession of evils,—birth, death, bereavement, and other sorrows,—arising from transition from body to body. The individual soul floats down the stream, “like a gourd upon the waters,” through embodiment after embodiment, “from a patch of grass to the first of the divinities,” through forms, inorganic and organic, vegetable, animal, human, ultrahuman, infernal, and celestial. Each later stage is determined by the good or evil actions of the individual in his earlier embodiments, by a blindly, a fatally operating law of retribution, adrishta. It is in conformity to this principle that the opifex aedificatorquc mundi deus, the Demiurgus, Īśvara, puts together and rules the transmigratory series through the successive aeons. It is this principle that clears the Demiurgus of the charge of cruelty and injustice on account of the miseries and inequalities of life. In all that it does and suffers the soul is reaping the fruits of its own actions. Its actions proceed from preferences and aversions; its preferences and aversions proceed from illusion, from its identifying itself with its per se unconscious senses, faculties, and organism. Merit, no less than demerit, prolongs the series, and must be shunned as sin by the aspirant to extrication.

The world, then, was pictured by the Indian sages as a series, beginningless and endless, of bodies and environments, through which personal souls—that is, the one soul illusively viewing itself as many—pass. They pass through it for the fruition of their works, bhoga. The material of which it is built up at each period of evolution is the cosmical illusion, ajnāna, aυidyā , māyā, prakriti. This is the principle by which soul mistakes itself for not-self, identifies itself with fictitious adjuncts, upādhi, with the organs, the faculties, the organism. It is this illusion that gives rise to the unreal world of duality, generable, mutable, corruptible, avidyāparikalpitam dυaitam. It is illusion that projects the manifold of experience, nānātvapratyupasthāpikā māyā. As the flow of transmigratory experiences is a succession of pleasures, pains, and neutral states, the world-projecting illusion is defined to be pleasure, pain, and indolence in equilibrium, gunatrayasāmya. Pleasure, pain, indifference, are the three primordia rerum, the factors of experience, the three strands of the rope that holds the soul in bondage. The world-projecting illusion is further spoken of as the power of the Demiurgus, his all-creative power, “the power of the divine spirit latent in its constituent primordia.” Thus Śankarāchārya in his Bhāshya on the Vedāntasūtra says: “Name and form (i.e., all that is heard and seen), the fictitious products of illusion, and the body of the omniscient Demiurgus,— name and form, inexplicable as entity and as nonentity, the germs of the transmigratory series,—are called the illusion, the power, the productiveness (prakriti) of the Demiurgus.” This illusion is “neither existent nor non-existent, nor both in one, neither to be explained as entity or as nonentity, fictitiously proceeding from and to all eternity.” It is the illusory adjunct, upādhi, of Brahman. The internal and the external order of things are illusorily superposed (adhyasta, adhyāropita) upon the one and only real, the impersonal self, by an illusion that has imagined itself from all eternity.

To illustrate this in the figures of the Vedanta :—“As a spider extends and retracts his threads, as plants grow up upon the earth, as the hairs of the head and body spring from the living man, so the world arises from the imperishable.” “As from the blazing fire its kindred sparks proceed in thousands, so the diverse creatures proceed from that imperishable principle and into it return.” All that presents itself to the soul in life after life, in sphere after sphere, lies in fictitious semblance above the real, like the blueness seen in the sky, though in the sky it has no existence; like the waters of a mirage; like the bubbles on the surface of a river; like the airy fabric of a day-dream; like the visions of a dream; like the silver seen, or seeming to be seen, on the shell of the pearl-oyster; like the snake seen by the. belated traveller in a piece of rope; like the gloom that surrounds the owl amidst the noontide glare. The soul is confined to the body as within a prison. Its doings and sufferings are as unreal as the apparent motion of the trees upon the bank to one sailing down the river. The experience of life after life is the phantasmagory of a waking dream. The unreality, the fictitious nature, of the things of experience is implied everywhere in the Upanishads, and explicated with a profusion of imagery, by the Indian schoolmen.

The contents of this transmigratory series are supplied from the popular religion, the earlier imagery being built up into the new conception. A place is found in it for the deities and their paradises; only these deities and their paradises, up to the Demiurgus himself, the Īśvara, and the brahmaloka, the sphere of Brahma, are per se fictitious, unreal, illusory. A sojourn in these paradises is promised to the religionist; assimilation to these deities is promised to those that worship them with knowledge as well as with rites. Every man, the Indian schoolmen say, shall be assimilated to the deity he worships. The highest reward of obedience to sacred prescription and of worship of the deities is continuance in the brahmaloka till the end of an aeon, “relative immortality,” āpekshikam nityatvam. The only real immortality is extrication from metempsychosis, reunion with the impersonal self, to be reached not by works but by knowledge. They that delight in works, in rites, and the spheres won by works, wander in darkness, are like the blind led by the blind. Works and worship are, however, necessary to purify the intellect of the aspirant to extrication. The process of purification may go on through several successive lives. Good works performed without a view to recompense, and as an offering to the Demiurgus, produce that purity of the internal faculties which is requisite to the knowledge that terminates in liberation from metempsychosis. They are thus instrumental to emancipation. Good works are necessary, says Śankarāchārya, to the rise of the spiritual intuition; they are unnecessary when it has once arisen. The qualified aspirant to liberation, the adhikārin, must renounce all works, the good as well as the evil, for they serve only to prolong the series of his embodiments. It is thus that the popular religion is taken up and fitted into the Vedānta philosophy. Karmavidyā is preliminary to brahmavidyā.

Māyā, the inexplicable illusion, self-imagined, has been the unreal adjunct, upādhi, illusorily overspread upon Brahman from all eternity. Brahman in its first connexion with ignorance or illusion is the Demiurgus, Īśvara, Parameśvara, the constructive and superintending deity of the Vedāntins. Before describing the process of things at a period of evolution, the conception of Brahman, the impersonal self, must be unfolded in the terms of the Vedānta.

Brahman is the one and real that underlies the many and apparent. It is ingenerable, immutable, incorruptible. It is the ultimate residuum of abstraction, to be spoken of only under negative predicates, sarvanishedhāvadhi. It transcends duality, the world of subject and object, jnātrijneyabhāvātirikta. It is one only without internal and external differences. “There is nothing before it, nor after it, nor within it, nor without it.” It is everlasting, objectless cognition, nityam nirvishayam jhānam. “Of the sight of the seer there is no intermission, for it is imperishable.” It is no object of the understanding, and it cannot be expounded in language. “From it words turn back, with the thinking faculty, not reaching it.” And this Brahman, this impersonal self, is I, aham brahmāsmi.

The impersonal self, Brahman, is “existent, intelligence, beatitude,” sachchīdānanda :—existent, as imparting existence and manifestations to everything that is known and seems to be, sat-tāsphūrtipradatayâ ; intelligence, as being self-luminous, as giving light to all things, making to appear all things that do appear, svaprākāśaka, sarvāvabhāsaka ; beatitude, as exempt from all the miseries of metempsychosis, from evil, pain, and sorrow, a beatitude in which there is no distinction between the bliss and the blissful subject, ananda and ānandin, a beatitude like the repose of dreamless sleep. It is “ever pure, intelligent, and free,” nitya-śuddhabuddhamukta :—pure, as free from desire and aversion, and passionless, and as unaffected by illusory limitations, nirupādhika; intelligent, as irradiating all things, illuminating the otherwise dark or unconscious modifications of the sensories and intellects of personal spirits, and as illuminating the objects of those modifications; free, as unaffected by the experiences of those spirits, exempt from implication in the unreal. It is unmodifiable, and therefore neither knows, nor acts, nor suffers. All cognition, action, and passion belong to the unreal world of duality, and are the modifications of the sensory and intellect of personal souls. These modifications would be dark, that is unconscious, but for the light of the underlying real self, in which they shine forth. In the absence of that real self the whole transmigratory order would be involved in blindness, tadabhāve jagadāndhyam prasajyeta. It is the witness,—that is, the inner light—of the cognitions of the intellects of all personal souls, sarvabuddhipratyayasākshin. It is “the light of lights beyond the darkness.” “To it the sun gives no light, nor the moon and the stars, nor the lightning,—how then this fire? That, as it shines, all the world shines after. By the light of that all this world shines forth.”

Brahman is said to abide especially within the heart, for it is there that the internal faculties are lodged, and it is by the light of Brahman that they are illumined. It is “the one spirit internal to all sentiencies,” ekah sarvabhūtāntarātmā. It is present to them all, as the one sun is mirrored upon many watery surfaces, as the ether one and indivisible in many water-jars. The personal self, the jīvātman, is said to be resolved into the impersonal Brahman in three states,—in dreamless sleep, in a period of dissolution between two aeons, and in emancipation. Dreamless sleep is called a “daily dissolution,” dainandinah pralayah.

To Brahman alone belongs existence in the strict sense of the term, pāramārthikī sattā. It is; everything else appears to be. The things of daily life have a conventional existence, sufficient for acting upon, insufficient to the reason, vyāvahārikī sattā. The silver seen upon the shell, the snake seen in the piece of rope, have an apparent existence, prātibhāsikī sattā. For the sage conventional existence is only apparent existence. At the foot of the scale of being stand things impossible or absurd, tuchcha, as the flowers of the sky, the horns of the hare.

Brahman is both the real and the operative cause of the world, the upādāna and the nimitta. It is the real cause, inasmuch as the transmigratory series fictitiously overlies it. “Over this the sky, the earth, the welkin, are woven.” “Illusion,” says Śankar-

āchārya, “the aggregate of the powers of all causes and effects, reposes upon Brahman, woven across and across it, as the potentiality of the banyan-tree reposes in the seed of the tree.” “A fictitious object,” says Ānandagiri, “such as the snake seen in a piece of rope, has a relatively real substratum in the piece of rope; the transmigratory series, unreal because phenomenal, has a real substance beneath it.” Brahman is the operative cause of the world, inasmuch as the world-projecting illusion, inert of itself, becomes active by proximity to Brahman, as iron is set in motion by the loadstone, the iron being inert of itself, and the loadstone unmoved and unchanged.

A process of evolution is called a “differentiation under name and form,” nāmarūpavyākarana. Processes of evolution and of dissolution follow one another from eternity to eternity. Embodiments have proceeded from works, and works from embodiments,...