Philosophies of India by Heinrich Zimmer

Author:Heinrich Zimmer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2026-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

2.

Upaniá¹£ad

THE CREATIVE philosophers of the period of the Upaniṣads, examining the problem of the ātman, were the pioneer intellectuals and freethinkers of their age. They stepped beyond the traditional priestly view of the cosmos. Yet, as we have seen, they went beyond it without dissolving or even criticizing it; for the sphere in which they delved was not the same as that which the priests had monopolized. They turned their backs on the external universe—the realm interpreted in the myths and controlled by the complicated rituals of the sacrifice—because they were discovering something more interesting. They had found the interior world, the inward universe of man himself, and within that the mystery of the Self. This transported them far from the empire of the numerous anthropomorphic deities who were the vested governors of both the macrocosm and the sense functions of the microcosmic organism. The introverted Brāhmanic philosophers were therefore spared that head-on collision with the priests and with the past which Democritus, Anaxagoras, and the other scientist-philosophers of Greece experienced when their scientific interpretations of the celestial bodies and other phenomena of the universe began to controvert the ideas held by the priests and supported by the gods. The sun could not be both a divine, anthropomorphic being named Helios and a glowing sphere of incandescent matter; one had to settle for one view or the other. When a philosopher’s focus, on the other hand (as was the case in India), is on a mystery the counterpart of which in the established theology is but a metaphysical, anonymous conception, well above and beyond the anthropomorphized powers, and revered simply as the indescribable fountainhead of the cosmos (an ens entis with which the polytheistic, more concrete, popular ritual cannot be directly concerned), then there can be neither an occasion nor a possibility for any outright theological-philosophical collision.

The new direction of thought nevertheless brought about a really dangerous devaluation both of the ritualistic theology and of the visible universe with which that theology was concerned; for instead of devoting attention to the gods and the outer world, the new generation was turning its whole consideration to that all-transcending, truly supernatural principle from which the forces, phenomena, and divine directors of the natural world proceeded: furthermore, these creative freethinkers were actually finding and making contact with that principle within themselves. Consequently, such intellectual energy as had formerly been devoted to the study and development of a machinery for the mastery of the demonic and divine forces of the cosmos—through an elaborate system of sacrificial propitiation and appeasing incantation—was being diverted inward, where it had just made contact with the supreme life-force itself. The cosmic energy was being taken at its fountainhead, where it came at its maximum of strength and abundance. As a result, all those secondary, merely derivative streams of energy, which had been dammed, canalized, and put to human use through the magic machinery of priestly ritual, were being left behind. In Indian thought, not only the gods but the whole outer world was dwindling in importance.

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