During the
Upanishadic period six seekers of the Knowledge of the Brahman, the Eternal,
approach Rishi Pippalada with due respect having done several years of tapasya.
The Rishi tells them to dwell in holiness and faith and askesis for another
year. Then Bhargava, hailing from Vidarbha, asks him: “Lord, how many Gods
maintain this creature, and how many illumine it, and which of these again is
the mightiest?” The Rishi
answers: “These are the Gods, even Ether and Wind and Fire and Water and Earth
and Speech and Mind and Sight and Hearing. These nine illumine the creature:
therefore they vaunted themselves, ‘We, even we support this harp of God and we
are the preservers.’ Then Breath answered, their mightiest: ‘Yield not unto
delusion: I dividing myself into this fivefold support this harp of God, I am
its preserver.’ ” [1] The presence of Prāņa
behind the five elements, indeed they coming from it, is what makes possible
this harp of God, this instrument, to play the earthly song of manifestation.
But Speech and Mind and Hearing and Sight, and the organs of cognition, come
from Manas, the sense-mind, the essential sense behind them, behind the other
five senses.
The material
universe we inhabit is formed from these five elemental states of Matter, the ādhibhautic constituents. In it move the
powers of Mind and Life, the ādhidaivic
Gods. But far beyond them are the ādhyātmic
or spiritual powers. Yet beyond them, beyond Indra and Vāyu and Agni, there is
the Consciousness-Force that gives rise to them all.
In his
commentary on the Kena Upanishad, Sri Aurobindo explains the Sankhya process as
follows: “…vibration of conscious being is presented to itself by various forms
of sense which answer to the successive operations of movement in its
assumption of form. For first we have intensity of vibration creating regular
rhythm which is the basis or constituent of all creative formation; secondly,
contact or intermiscence of the movements of conscious being which constitute
the rhythm; thirdly, definition of the grouping of movements which are in
contact, their shape; fourthly, the constant welling up of the essential force
to support in its continuity the movement that has been thus defined; fifthly,
the actual enforcement and compression of the force in its own movement which
maintains the form that has been assumed. In Matter these five constituent operations
are said by the Sankhyas to represent themselves as five elemental conditions
of substance, the etheric, atmospheric, igneous, liquid and solid; and the
rhythm of vibration is seen by them as śabda, sound, the basis of
hearing, the intermiscence as contact, the basis of touch, the definition as
shape, the basis of sight, the upflow of force as rasa, sap, the basis
of taste, and the discharge of the atomic compression as gandha, odour,
the basis of smell. It is true that this is only predicated of pure or subtle
Matter; the physical matter of our world being a mixed operation of force,
these five elemental states are not found there separately except in a very
modified form.”[2]
The supreme Consciousness
operates by a supreme Sense, its original action that highest movement of
Vishnu which, the Veda tells us, the seers behold like an eye extended in
heaven. It is that by which the soul sees its seeings and hears its hearings.
This spiritual sense of things senses our sensations of objects, sees our
seeings, hears our hearings.
According to the
Śrimad Bhāgavata Purāņa Kapila, an early incarnation of Vishnu,
expounded to his mother Devahuti the Sankhya system of material creation. He
postulates primordial matter to be the germ or source, Pradhān, from which
proceeds or evolves the whole created universe. Unmanifest, eternal, existing
as its own cause and effect, undifferentiated, this Pradhān in the nature of
Prakriti consists of three fundamental qualities or Gunas in a state of perfect
equilibrium. The Creator by his own Will-Power or Maya or dynamic Energy abides
in her, ever unaffected and is the Inner Controller or Purusha, her passive
Lord; but standing outside as the activator of Prakriti, he is Kāla or Time by
whose potency Prakriti’s evolution becomes possible. Thus, when equilibrium of
the three Guņas of Prakriti—Sattwa-Rajas-Tamas—is disturbed by the Energy of
the Purusha the principle of Mahat comes into existence. Mahat or Cosmic
Intelligence, luminous with a golden light, undergoes further transformation by
the action of that Energy and a threefold Ego or Ahankār arises from it. Ahankār
then turns into a source of multiple functionings related to cognition and
action. From the Sāttwic Ego emerge Chitta and Manas, the pure reflective
Reason and Mind; from the Rājasic Ego come Intelligence or Buddhi and the ten
Indriyas consisting of five senses of perception and five senses of action; the
Tāmasic Ego is the originator first of the five subtle and then of the five
gross elements.[3]
We have thus in this system of
enumeration Prakriti as the “rootless root of the universe” and twenty-four
Tanmātrās or elemental categories of Matter seeded by the potency of the
Purusha or Kāla, Time, which is
the twenty-fifth. The twenty-four Tanmātrās that constitute the kit of the
cosmic Prakriti are as follows. In the group of the ten Indriyas we have
auditory, tactile, sight, taste, and olfactory as five senses of perception;
the mouth—or the organ of speech—the hands, the feet, the organ of generation,
and the organ of defecation are the senses of action; the four internal senses
are made up of Mind, Buddhi, Ego, and Reason; the remaining ten are divided
into subtle and gross elements with sound, touch, colour, taste, and
smell—Shabda, Sparsha, Rūpa, Rasa, and Gandha—falling in the first and ether,
air, fire, water, and earth—Ākāśa,
Vāyu, Agni or Tejas, Āpas, and Pŗthvī—in
the second category. The ten Indriyas are the evolutes of the Rājasic Ego; therefore the power of
perception, the Buddhi, and the power of action, Prāņa, are also products of this Rājasic Ego. The Tāmasic
Ego, when it undergoes transformation because of the Energy of the Creator,
first puts forth the five subtle elements—sound, touch, colour, taste, and
smell—and then modifies them further to produce the five gross ones, ether,
air, fire, water, and earth; the gross elements in turn give rise to the organs
of perception. Thus from sound evolved ether and finally the organ of hearing,
the ear. But with the agency of Time
ether itself undergoes transformation, producing the principle of touch and
then air and the tactile sense; in this manner the remaining elements and their
organs emerge to give rise to the complete material world. In the operation of
the Tāmasic Ego the actual
sequence is from the subtle to the gross finally leading to the physical—sound
giving rise to the ether and then the ear, for example. But what we witness in
the physical world is exactly the reverse; it is the ear whose object of perception
is, through the intervening medium of ether, sound.
Thus while we have the entire
paraphernalia ready at hand, we see that it cannot yet give rise to the body of
the Cosmic Being, the Virāt,
because a distinction has to be made between Matter and Body. In Prakriti’s
evolution when the Creator saw that the Mahat, the Ego, and the five gross
elements, the Pancha Mahābhutas,
still stood disunited, he took with him Time and entered into them. With the
birth of the Cosmic Being, named Vishesh at this stage, the whole manifestation
was set into motion. Vishesh is said to be enveloped from all the sides,
successively by the belts of water, fire, air, ether, Ego, the Mahat, and
finally by the vast extent of Primordial Matter. From the Cosmic Being arose the
deities that preside over several cosmic functionings.[4] Such is the scheme by
which the Kapila Sankhya arrives at the material creation, a process employed
by the Spirit to turn into Matter and finally assume the physical body.
Obviously, it is implied that any materialisation that is intended to be
carried out can be carried out similarly, only by going through all these
stages.
Patanjali—was he Kapila himself in
one of his earlier births as is hinted by certain traditions?—in his work
touches aphoristically upon some of these aspects of the material creation. The
Perceivable is asserted to be of the nature of Illumination, Activity, and
Inertia, corresponding to the three Guņas of the Sankhya Prakriti, Sattwa,
Rajas, and Tamas. It undergoes transformation from subtle into gross and is
finally endowed with senses of perception to fulfil the purpose of experience
and absolution or beatitude, Bhoga and Apavarga. The specific or gross forms of
ether, air, fire, water and earth are said to be evolutes of the unspecific
subtle elements sound, touch, colour, taste, and smell.[5] There is a great
deal of similarity between the processes described by the Bhāgavata Purāņa
and Vyasa’s commentary on Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra.
We can thus
generally say that the Kapila-Patanjali Sankhya system of material creation
accounts for the universe on principles of Cosmic Evolution through the Process
of Enumeration. Prakriti, the material Force, or the inconscient Energy, is the
ultimate ground on which the manifested world stands. The objectified
matter-stuff, the individual indeterminate, Tanmātrā, becomes the determinate
matter-stuff giving rise to atomic constituents, Paramāņus, of the gross
physical. The five elemental conditions of Matter, the five Paramaņus, ether,
air, fire, water, and earth, are the quantitative basis of material forms; the
five Tanmātrās, sound, touch, sight, taste, and smell, are the qualitative
elements. It is through these that the sensory consciousness is related to the
gross forms of Matter. The traditional Sankhya system based on the lower Nature
stops here but the Gita, as pointed out by Sri Aurobindo, goes much farther
than that.
The Gita’s Sankhya is
eightfold, consisting of earth, water, fire, air, ether, mind, reason and ego;
this is perfectly in line with the traditional Sankhya. But by making a radical
departure from this system it asserts that it is really the higher Prakriti who
brings out the universe through her dynamism actuated by the supreme Purusha
himself. The mechanical and the inconscient can take on the appearance of
consciousness precisely because of the reflection of Purusha in Prakriti. “I am
the taste in the waters, sound in ether, scent in earth, energy of light in
fire,”[6] touch or contact in air, declares the Lord of this vast teeming
creation in which is also included the material. The play here is possible
because of the origin of the elemental conditions and the necessary relations
are actually in the higher Nature of the Supreme himself. Let us run along the
comments of Sri Aurobindo in the Essays on the Gita.
Prakriti is constituted of three Guņas
or essential modes of energy; Sattwa, the seed of intelligence, conserves the
workings of energy; Rajas, the seed of force and action, creates the workings
of energy; Tamas, the seed of inertia and non-intelligence, the denial of
Sattwa and Rajas, dissolves what they create and conserve. When these three
powers of the energy of Prakriti are in a state of equilibrium, all is in rest,
there is no movement, action or creation and there is therefore nothing to be
reflected in the immutable luminous being of the conscious Soul. But when the
equilibrium is disturbed, then the three Guņas fall into a state of inequality
in which they strive with and act upon each other and the whole inextricable
business of ceaseless creation, conservation and dissolution begins, unrolling
the phenomena of the cosmos. This continues so long as the Purusha consents to
reflect the disturbance which obscures his eternal nature and attributes to it
the nature of Prakriti; but when he withdraws his consent, the Guņas fall into
equilibrium and the soul returns to its eternal, unchanging immobility; it is
delivered from phenomena… Not Soul alone by its nature of conscious knowledge,
will and delight is the cause of the universe, but Soul and Nature are the dual
cause, a passive Consciousness and an active Energy. So the Sankhya explains
the existence of the cosmos.
But whence then come this conscious
intelligence and conscious will which we perceive to be so large a part of our
being and which we commonly and instinctively refer not to the Prakriti, but to
the Purusha? According to the Sankhya this intelligence and will are entirely a
part of the mechanical energy of Nature and are not properties of the soul;
they are the principle of Buddhi, one of the twenty-four Tattwas, the
twenty-four cosmic principles. Prakriti in the evolution of the world bases
herself with her three Guņas in her as the original substance of things,
unmanifest, inconscient, out of which are evolved successively five elemental
conditions of energy or matter,—for Matter and Force are the same in the
Sankhya philosophy. These are called by the names of the five concrete elements
of ancient thought, ether, air, fire, water and earth; but it must be
remembered that they are not elements in the modern scientific sense but subtle
conditions of material energy and nowhere to be found in their purity in the
gross material world. All objects are created by the combination of these five
subtle conditions or elements. Again, each of these five is the base of one of
five subtle properties of energy or matter, sound, touch, form, taste and
smell, which constitute the way in which the mind-sense perceives objects. Thus
by these five elements of matter put forth from primary energy and these five
sense relations through which matter is known is evolved what we would call in
modern language the objective aspect of cosmic existence.
Thirteen other principles
constitute the subjective aspect of the cosmic Energy,—Buddhi or Mahat, Ahankāra,
Manas and its ten sense-functions, five of knowledge, five of action. Manas,
mind, is the original sense which perceives all objects and reacts upon them;
for it has at once an inferrent and an efferent activity, receives by
perception what the Gita calls the outward touches of things, Bāhya
Sparsha, and so forms its idea of the world and exercises its reactions of
active vitality. But it specialises its most ordinary functions of reception by
aid of the five perceptive senses of hearing, touch, sight, taste and smell,
which make the five properties of things their respective objects, and
specialises certain necessary vital functions of reaction by aid of the five
active senses which operate for speech, locomotion, the seizing of things,
ejection and generation. Buddhi, the discriminating principle, is at once
intelligence and will; it is that power in Nature which discriminates and
coordinates. Ahankāra, the
ego-sense, is the subjective principle in Buddhi by which the Purusha is
induced to identify himself with Prakriti and her activities. But these
subjective principles are themselves as mechanical (Jada), as much a part of
the inconscient energy as those which constitute her objective operations.
The traditional Sankhya sets up an
unbridgeable division between the Soul and Nature; it has to posit them as two
quite distinct primary entities. But there is something else; there is a higher
principle, a nature of spirit, Para Prakriti. There is a supreme nature of the
Divine which is the real source of cosmic existence and its fundamental
creative force and effective energy. This other higher Prakriti is, says
Thus in the context of Narad’s
arrival at Madra we might say the following. Driven by his spiritual will and
employing the immediate Manas sense along with the potency of the dynamic
vital-nervous force, the Prāņic
energy, he prepares his physical body. Passing from mind into material things,
he is now ready to enter the palace hall of King Aswapati.
We have an interesting description
in Savitri about how Death, the dynamic agent of the inconscient Void,
brings out for his own purposes a material world using the Sankhya:
I curbed the vacant ether into
Space;
A huge expanding and contracting
breath
Harboured the fires of the
universe:
I struck out the supreme original
spark
And spread its sparse ranked armies
through the Inane,
Manufactured the stars from the
occult radiances,
Marshalled the platoons of the
invisible dance;
I formed earth’s beauty out of atom
and gas,
And built from chemic plasm the
living man… [8]
It is clear that whoever might cherish
the idea to create a material world, of necessity he has to resort to the only
Sankhya procedure available for the purpose: in order to execute the cherished
intention Sankhya has to be employed. Not the claimer of the work’s authorship
who counts, but mechanism’s the thing. It is of course possible that the
quality of the work despite the mechanism being the same could be different in
different hands. In fact this is exactly what happens.
RY Deshpande
[1] The
Upanishads, p. 299
[2] Ibid., pp. 196-97
[3] Śrimad Bhāgavata, Book
III, Discourse 26
[4] Ibid
[5] Yoga Sutra, for
instance, III:32-36
[6] The Gita, VII:8-9; Essays
on the Gita, p. 261
[7] Essays on the Gita, pp.
65-69, 89-91, 254-58, 480-83
[8] Savitri, p. 617
Source: This is Chapter VII of the author’s book entitled Narad’s
Arrival at Madra published by the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of
Education, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Pondicherry (2006). It is based on the opening
passage of 83 lines of the Book of Fate of Savitri. As it is dealing
with the Sankhya process of materialization, I’m reproducing it here in the
context of the discussion at
http://www.mirroroftomorrow.org/blog/_archives/2009/1/2/4042583.html
where we have very valuable details about
the nature of the physical reality behind the gross formation with which the
physical science is familiar. Thanks to Pavitra for keeping a record of the
conversation he and a couple of other disciples had with Sri Aurobindo in 1926,
just a few months before his retirement to concentrate on the work of the
supramental descent in the bodily material. There are a few chapters in the
book discussing this topic from various angles and these will be serialised to have
a comprehensive idea of the whole thing as far as possible for us.
http://www.mirroroftomorrow.org/blog/_archives/2009/1/5/4046092.html
Chapter VI appears at:
http://www.mirroroftomorrow.org/blog/_archives/2009/1/8/4049410.html
The next chapter, Chapter VIII, has
already appeared at
http://www.mirroroftomorrow.org/blog/_archives/2009/1/2/4042583.html