Essays on the Gita

Sankhya, Yoga and Vedanta 91Sankhya, as had already indeed been done by certain of theUpanishads. 4 But still there is a defect in the Vedantic positionwhich has to be overcome. We may, perhaps, conjecture that atthis time the Vedanta had not yet redeveloped the later theistictendencies which in the Upanishads are already present as anelement, but not so prominent as in the Vaishnava philosophiesof the later Vedantins where they become indeed not onlyprominent but paramount. We may take it that the orthodoxVedanta was, at any rate in its main tendencies, pantheistic atthe basis, monistic at the summit. 5 It knew of the Brahman, onewithout a second; it knew of the Gods, Vishnu, Shiva, Brahmaand the rest, who all resolve themselves into the Brahman; butthe one supreme Brahman as the one Ishwara, Purusha, Deva —words often applied to it in the Upanishads and justifying to thatextent, yet passing beyond the Sankhya and the theistic conceptions— was an idea that had fallen from its pride of place; 6 thenames could only be applied in a strictly logical Brahmavada tosubordinate or inferior phases of the Brahman-idea. The Gitaproposes not only to restore the original equality of these namesand therefore of the conceptions they indicate, but to go a stepfarther. The Brahman in its supreme and not in any lower aspecthas to be presented as the Purusha with the lower Prakriti forits Maya, so to synthetise thoroughly Vedanta and Sankhya,and as Ishwara, so to synthetise thoroughly both with Yoga; butthe Gita is going to represent the Ishwara, the Purushottama,as higher even than the still and immutable Brahman, and theloss of ego in the impersonal comes in at the beginning asonly a great initial and necessary step towards union with thePurushottama. For the Purushottama is the supreme Brahman.It therefore passes boldly beyond the Veda and the Upanishadsas they were taught by their best authorised exponents and4 Especially the Swetaswatara.5 The pantheistic formula is that God and the All are one, the monistic adds that Godor Brahman alone exists and the cosmos is only an illusory appearance or else a real butpartial manifestation.6 This is a little doubtful, but we may say at least that there was a strong tendency inthat direction of which Shankara’s philosophy was the last culmination.