The Brahma Sutras as a Moksha Shastra -1.1 Swami Krishnananda.

"60 quintals of bronze #Om (Om) will soon be installed in Kedarnath Dham. The District Disaster Management Authority has successful trial to establish this figure. District Magistrate Mayur Dixit said that if the shape of Om in Kedarnath, the grandeur of the Dham will increase even more."

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Sunday, 04 June, 2023. 07:30.

Chapter 1: The Differing Views of Sankaracharya and Ramanuja on Brahman - 1.

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The tripod of Indian thought and culture is constituted of three great venerable scriptures known as the Upanishads, the Brahma Sutras and the Bhagavadgita. The Upanishads are the hidden mystical import of the Veda Samhitas such as the Rigveda, Yajurveda, Samaveda and Atharaveda. Each Veda has four sections dealing with different topics. The primary and the most important part of each Veda is the Samhita, which is the mantra recited with intonation, as is chanted in temples and during worship of any kind. Even in our own temple these mantras—Rudra Sukta, Purusha Sukta, Narayana Sukta, etc.—are chanted during abhisheka to Lord Siva. These are outwardly and apparently hymns or prayers offered to the gods in the high heaven, which I do not wish to discuss now because my subject is something different.

The mystical meaning of these hymns or prayers is so deep that it passes human understanding. Therefore, these hidden meanings are transcendent in their nature, transcendent because they touch the core of being, beyond sense perception and intellectual comprehension. The seers and sages of the Upanishads, the great masters of yore, plumbed the depths of Reality and recognised a common substance permeating all things, going beyond the usual distinction that we make between the seer and the seen object. They are transcendent because of the fact that their perception is totally different from ordinary human perception.

Great tapas and austerity are called for on the part of any student who embarks upon this adventure of studying and understanding the import of the Upanishads. The Upanishads are the result of intense austerity of the soul, the spirit, of those great masters who detached themselves from every kind of external contact and confined themselves to a face-to-face encounter with the Reality of the universe. Who on earth can think in this way? Which person in the world is capable of encountering the whole universe directly, face to face, without being conditioned by the apparatus of sensory perception and logical understanding?

We have a stereotyped way of assessing values in the world. I see something, and I judge that thing in the light of how I see that particular thing. Seeing is believing. But the truth of the universe does not seem to be confined to this apparent bifurcation compelled upon human perception due to the individuality of each being segregated from the world outside. I am inside and the world is outside. Above this distinction commonly made in the human vision of things there is a supernormal vision which reveals before us a reality which will astound us and raise our spirits to a height that is unimaginable to our ordinary thinking process. Such a procedure was adopted in the Upanishads.

These days, many people study the Upanishads. The schools teaching the Upanishads generally follow a tradition of trying to learn the meaning of the Upanishads grammatically, linguistically—purely from the point of view of their lexical and etymological meaning. The spirit of a thing is not the same as what we can comprehend about it through any linguistic or literary process. The Upanishads are not easy to understand. Though we may read them several times and imagine that we have grasped them with our learning and educational capacity, yet they cannot be easily understood. It is because of the difficulty of going into the depths of the Upanishads that great masters or acharyas such as Sankara, Ramanuja, and Madhava differed from one another. That these great heroes of learning and theological wisdom did not agree with one another is evidence enough to show the difficulty involved in understanding the true meaning of the statements of the Upanishads.

Great tapas and austerity are called for on the part of any student who embarks upon this adventure of studying and understanding the import of the Upanishads. The Upanishads are the result of intense austerity of the soul, the spirit, of those great masters who detached themselves from every kind of external contact and confined themselves to a face-to-face encounter with the Reality of the universe. Who on earth can think in this way? Which person in the world is capable of encountering the whole universe directly, face to face, without being conditioned by the apparatus of sensory perception and logical understanding?

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To be continued

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