The Age of the Sages: The Axial Age in Asia and the Near East

8. The Vedantic Solution

8 The Vedantic Solution The Upanishads were composed by sages seeking to unlock the deepest mysteries of existence. Essentially, they wanted to know two things: the nature of ultimate reality and the true nature of the self. Apprehending these, they believed, would confer the liberating knowledge that would halt the samsaric cycle and bring about a state of utter bliss. The Upanishads thus take two seemingly opposite trajectories. One is in the direction of comprehending the universe in its greatest possible sense, that is, in knowing the fundamental power or principle underlying the totality of all there is. The other direction is that of discovering what lies deep within the individual as his or her essence. The Upanishads have much to say about both lines of inquiry. The Concept of the Self An acerbic bumper sticker once admonished its readers, “Never forget that you are unique—just like everyone else!” Of course, we are all unique, but then there is nothing unique about being unique. We human beings do like to think we are special, whether as individuals or as a species. We want to believe there is something about us that sets us apart from everything else. In the book of Genesis, for instance, the god creates all the animals simply by calling them into existence, but when it comes to the human, he personally fashions a body made of dust and breathes into it the breath of life. God’s animating breath and particular attention differentiate humans from the other animals and make us special. This example from Genesis is not unique, either. Almost all creation narratives reserve special treatment for humans. Other animals do not seem to be as obsessed with themselves as humans are. In fact, there are no other creatures that dwell so much on what they are and what they should be. For millennia, we human beings have wondered about ourselves and about what 75 gives us life and determines our qualities. We have spent enormous amounts of intellectual energy trying to determine the essence of being human—what it is that makes us different from other beings and different from each other. Maybe that drive in itself is part of our essential natures: we are the animals who must interpret ourselves. The vast majority of religions and philosophies over the past three thousand years have said the human essence is something more than our material bodies. They have given various names to this essence, such as “self,” “spirit,” “mind,” “heart,” and perhaps the most common, “soul.” There has rarely been much precision about what this essence actually is, but these terms and others like them are what religions and philosophies have used to indicate that aspect of being, whatever it might be, that animates and gives life to our bodies and signifies what we truly are. The sages who composed the Upanishads used the word atman to designate the true human essence. Like the idea of karma, atman was an ancient Vedic term that was reinterpreted and redefined in the Axial Age. In the early Vedas, the atman was closely associated with breath. (The German verb meaning “to breathe” is atmen, spelled almost the same way as the Sanskrit.) The Vedic notion that the breath might be the human essence was based on the rather commonsensical view that since breathing stops at death, breath must be the animating force of life. But by the time the Upanishads had begun to be composed, the identification of atman with breath was unsatisfying to most thinkers. The breath was seen as too physical, too closely associated with the body. In one of the Upanishads, the great god Indra is even depicted as worried about this association. In response to a shramana who claims that body and self are identical, Indra reasons, “If our self, our atman, is the body, and is dressed in clothes of beauty when the body is, then when the body is blind, the atman is blind, and when the body is lame, the atman is lame; and when the body dies, the atman dies. I cannot find any joy in this doctrine.”1 What the sages of the Upanishads sought as the human essence was something that transcends the body and survives death, an immortal substance. Part of the context of this passage, of course, was the increasing anxiety about the fate of the individual at death, one of the major themes of the axial transformation. If not the body or the...