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God in Indian Philosophy 2
Aug 23 2007 | Views 63 |
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Such a high flown style in which everybody is sought to be converted into a believer of God may have some interest for the student of Sanskrit language and literature. For the honest student of the actual history of Indian philosophy, however, the whole thing is only a verbal wrapping covering deliberate distortions. Specially so are the references to the 'followers of Kapila' or the Sankhya philosophers, the Saugatas or the Budhists, the Digambara Jains, the Mimansakas, and even the Charvakas--all of whom were sought to be shown as real believers in God, but all of whom as a matter of fact did their best to argue against His existence.
In short, perhaps to the envy of a stage magician, Udayana shows the grand trick of conjuring up a series of devout theists from a hat containing renowned atheists. And how does he try to perform this magic? By the use of what Indian philosophers called samanya-chala--a form of purposive distortion of the actual position of the atheists.
The Sankhya philosophers did call Kapila the First Knower or adi-vidvan, just as the Budhists and Jainas refused to admit any limit to the wisdom of the Budha and the Jinas. But does this mean that they believed in omniscience and therefore in God? Far from this. One of the main reasons why the Sankhyas considered the founder of their philosophy (Kapila) to have been so profoundly wise was his determined effort to evolve an explaination of the universe with the conscious exclusion of God from it. The same was broadly true for the Budhists and Jainas.
The Mimansakas did firmly believe in the Vedic injuctions mostly concerned with the performance of the Vedic rituals. But nowhere in Mimansa literature do we come across the strang e idea that the Vedic injuctions are 'the object of worship'. On the contrary, the Mimansakas were themselves never tired of repeatedly explainaing that they found it necessary to deny God--and therefore also the efficacy of worship--precisely because they wanted to make room for the absolute validity of the Vedic injuctions. The rituals by themselves (i.e. by their inherent efficacy) were supposed to produce their respective results. There could be no place for any divine intervention in this belief.
But the limit of Udayana's chala is to be seen in his characterisation even of the Charvakas as pious believers in God, and this on the ground that even they believed in one whose authority is established by the convention of the world. Later writers tried to salvage some sense out of this, but this was trying to achieve the impossible; a chala as absurd as this made no sense at all. (It is suggested that in the Charvaka view, God is nothing but the visible image of the deity popularly worshipped. Assuming historicity behind this, it is evidently to be understood as a way of mocking at the idea of God: the lump of clay or stone popularly worshipped is real like any other material object, but the attribution of divinity to it is fictitious.)
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