S5E6 Traditional Enlightenment
This episode investigates notions of liberation from the traditional early and late Vedic literature, with an emphasis on the nuance that exists in the late Veda, also known as the Upanishads. In particular, we present the views of the three great commentators: Shankara, Ramanuja, and Madhva. This investigation reveals subtle and exciting differences in how the Upanishads have been interpreted, and what this means for conceptions of enlightenment.
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Edited Transcript
Greetings, everybody. Welcome back.
In this season of the podcast, we've been trying to speak directly about enlightenment, or the idea of liberation as something central in the yoga traditions, and we've talked about it as a kind of qualitative transformation of the individual, something that surpasses mere psychological modification and pushes into the transformation of our deepest sense of value, our deepest sense of identity, so we characterize it as a transformation beyond the level of the personality.
In the last episode, we discussed contemporary definitions of enlightenment. So we brought commentary from recent teachers, who have all been very influential on the Shala. In this episode, we circle back to the traditions from the first several seasons to speak about liberation from their perspective, in part to keep noting that, though you can make the statement that yoga, broadly speaking, is about liberation, there is no single vision of what it means to reach that goal.
In this episode, we want to focus briefly on the early and the late Vedic periods. Then we'll continue on with a few more episodes that concern things like the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali, the Bhagavad Gita, and then the Siddha Yoga traditions from the third season, which include hatha yoga and tantra.
Early Veda
Starting with the Vedic revelation, it's important to remember that the Vedas are loosely divided into two parts. The early Veda is primarily concerned with ritual, and it is this part that's often referred to as the mimamsaka. The Mimamsakas are the Vedic ritualists whose purpose is to officiate in the enactment of the Vedic sacrifice, and also to engage in philosophical discussion that defends the Vedic sacrifice as the proper way to address the existential crises that we face in life, and therefore the proper way to realize the meaning and purpose that is available to us. The later part of the Veda is most often referred to as Vedanta, and we see this in that sublime body of literature called the Upanishads. In the Upanishad, as we saw in the first several seasons, this notion that we have to make a sacrifice is internalized Inside the individual practitioner, and that internalization inaugurates the quest for Brahman, or the ultimate source of being, in an attempt to realize the proper relationship between the human soul or the Atman, and the source, or what we would call God.
Now, the early Veda, the Mimamsaka, is also called the time of the Samhitas: the Rig Veda, the Sama Veda, the Yajur Veda, and the Atharva Veda. And in this body of literature, there's not really a clear concept of escaping the birth and death cycle, or liberation, as it comes to be spoken of in not only the yoga traditions that follow, like the Upanishad, but also by the Buddha. What we see in the Samhitas is an idea of living virtuously by performing the sacrificial rituals that are prescribed in a timely and careful manner. And this ensures several things, but mainly, one is hoping not to be reborn in a lower station in life. One is hoping to be reborn, hopefully at a higher station, and there are very subtle levels, rarefied levels, in which one can be born.
I should mention that some scholars insist that there's not even a coherent concept of rebirth in this literature, and so it's kind of unclear. But in general, the teachers that I have been with and the things that I have studied do suggest that there's an idea of the birth and death cycle, but there's no real idea of escaping it as a kind of instantiation of being liberated.
Now, the Mimamsa Sutra is the expression of the philosophy that supports the existence of the Vedic sacrifice and its continued performance. So in the Mimamsa sutra, the goal of life is to act in the world according to what the Veda refers to as the Dharma: we want to participate in the sacrificial rituals in a good way, so that the boons or the rewards that they confer can be ours, and these rewards could be rain for the crops, or healthy crops in general, or knowledge about the present or the future, or, as I mentioned, a better birth in the next life.
It's important to note here that later in the Bhagavad Gita, this way of performing the sacrifice, or this way of living according to the Dharma, is called the path of action. Dharma is an interesting word. It can be translated as law, or duty, or virtue, or action, which is kind of a common theme in all of these iterations that I mention. To give a sense of this, let’s read something from the Mimamsa sutra on the nature of action:
“According to some, the Vedas deal with the problem of the soul as their principal subject matter. But this is not correct, because we find that they deal with the world of nature, which is not permanent. This has been stated to be their subject matter, and that is how they are taught and explained. And all Vedic literature is of the same kind as they deal with the problem of action. They tell us what actions to perform and how to perform them.”
So, from this most ancient perspective, we're in this place and we need to behave in a way that is not destructive, in a way that is virtuous, in a way that is cooperative with laws of the universe, so that we maintain ourselves in good standing, and the sacrifice - or the way of action - is the way to accomplish this.
Vedanta
Now, in the later Veda, which is expressed in the Upanishad and referred to as Vedanta, we begin to see ideas of liberation as escape from the birth and death cycle. So the Upanishad is, in a sense, a rejection of the formal, externalized Vedic sacrifice, which gets internalized and becomes a kind of contemplative practice. In this new, internalized context, one is looking to realize the relationship between the soul and the source and thereby free oneself from any liability for rebirth. Here's a quote from Dr Keith Ward, an English scholar who is an interesting man. He's a Christian theologian, but also someone who is very conversant with the Indian traditions and their ideas of liberation. Dr Ward says it is important to see that Vedanta “takes its stand on the supreme authority of Scripture, not on human reasoning. The scripture in question is the Veda, which is taken to include not only the four main collections known as the Samhitas, but also and mainly the Upanishads, which were added later.” The Bhagavad Gita itself is considered to be an Upanishad.
All of these Scriptures, which are divine revelations, are read and interpreted in different ways by different teachers. Now, this is a complex subject, and I'm just speaking about it in the time we have, to give you a sense of the diversity of what Vedanta means. It was a very important moment in my life as a yoga teacher and a student of these things to see that when I began to read the Upanishads and to encounter Vedanta, I encountered an interpretation that comes from one of the three heavyweight teachers that I'm going to mention. So I was amazed to see the diversity, and this helped me understand how the idea of liberation has nuance within one “tradition” called Vedanta.
The Major Players
The three major players are Shankaracharya, Ramanujacharya, and Madhvacharya. Those of us in the West, whether we know it or not, are generally influenced by Shankaracharya. Shankara is said to have lived sometime between 788 and 820, and he was from Kerala. He was a Shaiva philosopher, and this means a follower of Shiva, and he's an exponent of what is called Pure non-dualism, or Advaita Vedanta. Advaita is a Sanskrit word that means “not two”.
Next, we have Ramanujacharya, who lived between 1056 and 1137, and he is from the Tamil country. Ramanuja is a Vaishnavite, which means a follower of Vishnu and a lover of Krishna. And he reads the Vedanta literature as a philosopher of what has come to be called qualified non-dualism, or vishishtadvaita vedanta.
And last, we have Madvacharya, who lived from 1238 to 1317, from the area of Karnataka. He, like Ramanuja, is a Vaishnavite, but he is an exponent of something called Pure dualistic Vedanta, or Dvaita Vedanta.
It's important to remember that each of these great thinkers is reading the text of the Upanishads and of the Bhagavad Gita, and is arriving at subtly different conclusions. Let's go into each of them individually and see if we can make sense of what liberation means for each of them, and then try to sum up a little bit about how those differences are significant for how we ourselves think about what it might mean to be liberated. Let's start with Shankara and Advaita, or non-dual Vedanta.
Shankaracharya
Shankara is one of the greatest commentators in the Vedanta school, and this idea of non-dual Vedanta has often been characterized as a position of monism: so, “not two” has often been taken as the idea that everything is ultimately one. Now this idea of oneness, in a strong interpretation of Shankara, is the idea that the soul, or the Atman, which is the word we find in the Upanishads that's usually translated as soul, is taken to be identical in substance with Brahman. And so we often hear the phrase atman is Brahman, and for Shankara, this is really important, because it sets up a kind of epistemological conundrum: the absolute sameness between the soul and God makes it difficult to explain our perception of differences between things in the world. On this strong reading of Shankara as a monist, any perception of difference in the world, or between one's self and other things, or between one’s self and God, is an illusion. This is the teaching of Maya, which is translated sometimes as illusion, and sometimes as veil, like a covering over the truth.
Shankara takes any perception of difference to be the product of ignorance or avidya. I have a quotation here from Dr Wendy Doniger about this idea of Maya: “that the phenomenal world of everyday experience and its biological round of birth and death was ultimately unreal, and the source of our bondage was taken as the basis for a monastic or ascetic life of renunciation.” So Shankara’s ideas tend to be characterized as ascetic. That idea of ascesis aims at complete control of the senses, of strong renunciation of the common things in life, a kind of pulling back from the world. This move of pulling back away from the world is necessary for someone who believes that perception is a veil that subtly hides the truth of who I am and keeps me in ignorance.
Ascetic renunciation as a move is key to understanding what awakening is for Shankara: because any perception of separateness - and the main perception of separateness we're concerned with here is the perception of difference between the soul and its source - arises from avidya and is ultimately an illusion, the identity of soul with the source is realized when the soul, “casts off its individuality and personal characteristics and becomes the simple eternal self.” So Shankara’s idea of awakening is inherently tied to this idea of casting off the illusion of individuality, which leaves only the pure self, which is the same in all things. Dr Keith Ward says, “the desiring agent and enjoyer, which we commonly call the self, has to be transcended and cast aside by ascetic discipline and meditation.”
This idea of the sense of individuality, which is equated with the sense of separateness here, which is an illusion, has often produced a metaphor to try and describe what liberation means in this context of strong Advaita Vedanta: that metaphor is a drop of water, or sometimes a grain of salt, being dissolved in the great ocean of bliss. From this perspective, if I can be a little bit cheeky in my description, heaven is going to be great, because I'm not going to be there, because in this idea, I am an illusory sense of separateness that produces endless desires that will never ultimately be fulfilled because they're based on an illusion. Once I am free of that, once I realize who it is that I am, I'll no longer be subject to those desires and the actions that ensue from them, and I will be free from this round of birth and death.
Ramanuja
Now, if we move to Ramanuja, we have an interesting amendment or subtle revaluation of Shankara's ideas. Ramanuja has something in common with Shankara, and also something that separates him from Shankara’s view. His position is called vishishtadvaita, and that means qualified non-dualism. So there's an element of oneness here, but that element of oneness doesn't subsume the whole picture. So what does this mean?
Ramanuja holds that there is indeed only one true divine source, which is Brahman, and the individual soul is non-separate from this source. In particular, the soul shares in the divine essence, which is called bliss, or Ananda. However, there are apparent differences between individual souls and God, and these are real. So the soul is like God in essence, and unlike God in expression, so to speak; both of these are true. There's an idea of sameness of essence, or a monism of essence, and a plurality of real phenomenon and manifestation.
Universal sameness in essence makes unification with God something similar in kind for all of us, but that realization will not destroy or eradicate our inherent individuality. Importantly here, Ramanuja conceives of the source as a person, something like us. I have a quote here that gives a sense of his beautiful conception of God. He says:
we know from Scripture that there is a supreme person whose nature is absolute bliss and goodness, who is fundamentally antagonistic to All evil, who is the cause of the origination, sustenance and dissolution of the world, who differs in nature from all other beings, who is all knowing, who by His mere will and thought, accomplishes all his purposes, who is an ocean of kindness, as it were, for all who depend on Him who is all merciful, who is immeasurably raised above the possibility of anyone being equal or superior to him whose name is the highest Brahman.
Here we see an attempt to formulate this oneness of essence within the reality of difference: we can experience our oneness of essence with the source in a relationship. That relationship shows the qualities of bliss, mercy, and kindness. But we are not equal or superior to the source: we are dependent for our existence on that source. This idea that the source is personal is extremely important because Ramanuja’s objections to Shankara’s strong non-dualism hinge on the notion of being able to have a relationship with the source. Also, if you are a qualified non-dualist, the teaching of Maya is unnecessary and false. The world is not an illusion. It is real, and the perceived differences between the soul and Brahman are the foundation for true worship.
When Ramanuja critiqued Shankara, he reasoned that if everything is ultimately one, then the distinctions between the source and the soul - i.e., between God and His devotees - are erased. They are illusions, and this, in turn, makes a mockery of worship and ritual action, which is founded on real differences, or what you might call a real relationship. Specifically, if the devotee and God are one, then worship is ultimately God praying and offering to himself, and for Ramanuja, this is an inherent devaluation of love, because true love is an exchange between two who are real and different from one another, and who come together in a unique relationship: what we might call a face to face meeting.
When Wendy Doniger is trying to make clear for us the differences between Ramanuja and Shankara’s strong non-dualism, she says, “Shankara’s non-dualism has the disadvantage that you cannot love God or worship God if you are God, or if you're God is without qualities.” For someone who is looking to turn to the source, not only for guidance, not only for love, but also for comfort and mercy, the differences between me and the source need to be real, because otherwise, true love is not possible. And love for Ramanuja as well as for Madhava, as we're about to see, is really the purpose of all existence, and the sign that liberation has been realized. When do I know, so to speak, that I have escaped the round of birth and death? It's when a certain love has been realized in this life. Now let's finish up with Madhvacharya.
Madhva
So Madhva is an exponent of what is called dvaita Vedanta, and that means dualistic Vedanta. We can make this clear by recalling everything that we have said about the Sankhya philosophy in the previous seasons. Sankhya is generally considered a dualistic cosmological plan of the universe. That means, in Samkhya, there is a pair of eternal realities. One is Purusha, pure consciousness, or awareness, or light, and then there is Prakrti, which is the stuff that nature is made out of, the material all bodies are made out of. This metaphysical idea is inherent in Madhva’s system: metaphysical reality, the nature of reality itself, is plural. It's not monistic. There's not just one thing. There are primarily two categories of reality.
Madhva lays out this plurality as being made of svatantra tattva, which means independent reality, and asvatantra tattva, which means dependent reality. The independent reality is Ishvara, and that means God as Vishnu or as Krishna in this case (Madhva is Vaishnavite). Ishvara is the independent reality, which is the cause of the universe. God is the only thing that is independent or uncaused, whose existence does not depend on anything else.
By contrast, the created universe is the dependent reality, consisting of the jiva (the individual soul) and the jada, which is the matter or the material of all things that exist. Now, importantly, individual souls themselves are plural. This means they are different and distinct realities. The jivas, which are the individual souls, are sentient. That means they know and feel and sense and think. Matter is non-sentient; on the other hand, it does not know, it does not feel, it does not think.
So Madhava really is the philosopher of differences. He's obviously in the camp where the differences between things are not only real, but these differences are really important. And he enumerates the difference between dependent and independent reality in a five fold structure: specifically, these differences are 1) differences between material things; 2) differences between material things and the soul; 3) differences between material things and God; 4) differences between individual souls; and 5) there are differences between the soul and God. This is the pancha bheda, the doctrine of differences.
This means that for Madhava, there is no object like any other object. There is no soul like any other soul. All souls are unique, and that uniqueness is reflected in individual personalities. There's a saying that Madhava would often teach to illustrate the importance of difference: “the sea is full, the tank is full, the pot is full. Everything is full, yet each fullness is different.” So here we are, sort of on the other end of the spectrum that we started on with Shankara. What's real here is the differences between the fullnesses. We see that there is a concept of fullness. This itself can be misleading, almost as if the concept of fullness is an illusion, and what's real is the differences between those fullnesses, the differences in their shape, the differences in their quantity, and so on and so on.
Here, the difference between the soul and God is real. Madhava doesn't want to entertain a sameness of essence in the way that Ramanuja did. He wants uniqueness, the uniqueness of the soul to be contrasted over and against the uniqueness of God. What does liberation mean in this context?
According to Madhvacharya, in liberation, there is a bliss that is attained, and that Bliss has to do with being unified with God. But the nature of this bliss is different for each person, based on each person's degree of knowledge and spiritual perfection. More than this, there isn't any real effort that individual souls or people can make that will achieve this unification with God. Bliss can only be realized through God's grace, which is Vishnu. Madhvacharya considered the yoga of knowledge (jnana yoga), or the yoga of realization, or renunciation, and the yoga of action (karma yoga), which is deeply related to the Vedic ritual, to be insufficient without bhakti: so devotion is the key. Devotion is the beckoning of the individual to the grace of God for salvation.
When liberation is achieved for Madhva, the bliss of Divine Love is felt, but that bliss of Divine Love is different for each person, and the differences between each person or each soul are going to be maintained after the advent of being freed from the birth and death cycle. So we're not going to lose our individuality. Madhva and Ramanuja share that in particular, but Madhva’s conception emphasizes difference even more than Ramanuja’s.
Summary
We noted that in the early Veda, there is no clear concept of liberation as it comes to be known in the later traditions. We also noted that some scholars argue that there's no clear expression even of the birth and death cycle of reincarnation there; nonetheless, what is advised is adherence to ritual sacrifice, which is known as following the Dharma in a life of virtuous action, in the hopes that everything will go well: we'll have the knowledge that we need, and in the case that there is an idea of rebirth, we won't be reborn in a situation that's worse than the one in which we find ourselves. Hopefully, we'll be reborn in a better situation.
In later Vedanta, we noted three main interpretations of the idea of what it means to be liberated from birth and death. In the non-dualistic traditions, this involves the overcoming of all sense of separateness, and entails the idea that when this happens, the personal sense of self dissolves like a drop of water or a grain of salt into the ocean of bliss. So there is no more unique individuality, no more sense of separateness. It's a kind of ultimate unity.
Then we saw that Ramanuja has the idea that we can realize a shared sense of bliss with God, and that in this shared sense of bliss, individual differences will be preserved to some extent. This is possible because, in essence, we are one and non-separate from the source, but our differences are real, and so we won't dissolve. We will be maintained in our individuality. At the same time, we'll be unified in the bliss that we feel because of our natural or ontological connection to the source.
Finally, we come to the philosopher of real ontological difference in Madhava. From his perspective, there is a chance to realize freedom from the birth and death cycle, and the realization of that freedom is a love relationship or a blissful relationship of being unified with God. The difference here is that the degree of bliss we feel, or the quality of bliss we feel, is different based on each individual's nature, and on the spiritual attainment and quality of the individual's knowledge. Even though all of those experiences of liberation are experiences of divine love, there's a subtle uniqueness to each of them that will be maintained in an eternity of freedom as I am united with God.
These ideas are fascinating. When I teach them to students, I see that there is often a kind of mishmash of all of them to some degree. It's important to remember that in what we generally call the West, we are a strongly individualistic culture, so we tend to think of/identify with the personality and with personal psychological content as if that were the source of our being. This really is a result of the loss of the concept of something like ‘soul’ in the secular world, and trying to fill that space with something like psychology. So we all think that what it means to be free is to be able to express individuality apart from any external constraint.
At the same time, people generally think of yoga as unity, and they just assume that unity would be a really great thing. But we see here that in the case of Shankara, there is a kind of unity that destroys any sense of separateness, and that kind of unity is attractive to some people. It sounds a lot like Buddhism, in a sense. In this context, it's not surprising that Ramanuja is said to have accused Shankara’s teaching of being “crypto Buddhist”, because the Buddha is the teacher of anatman, or the teacher of no self, and therefore the teacher who is dismissive of personality at the ultimate scale. So if you have that idea of unity, there's a way of reading the Vedanta through Shankara’s eyes which will satisfy you.
But if you have an idea that there is something very important about my uniqueness; if you are affected, for instance, by disciplines like Ayurveda, which is the discipline of individual uniqueness, and the application of herbal theory and pranayama and devotional strategies and meditation in ways that take try to take into account individual uniqueness, then this monistic idea of unity begins to be a little bit unsettling: I always thought that if I was liberated, I would still be there in heaven. I can't imagine being changed into something that doesn't recognize individuality, or recognize the others with whom I cherish my relations. I couldn't imagine that as being part of what it means to be free. So Ramanuja and Madhava hold down the space where the individual soul will not be erased, where it will not dissolve, and where it will remain in a relationship. This makes possible a kind of love that is very familiar to us, and is something for which we all yearn.
So I really hope this has been interesting, and I hope it gets you thinking about how you think about ideas like unity and freedom, and the individual, and the community, and love, and so on. So next time, we'll come back again with more traditional definitions of liberation from things like the yoga sutra and the Bhagavad Gita.
Until then, God bless you all. Thanks for listening, and we hope to see you next time.
