VEDANTA REVISITED

Vedanta is described as "the loftiest of Vedic knowledge."  Its teachings are based on the mystical experience and the philosophical expression of the ancient sruti or "revealed" truth.  Vedantists are often termed nonsectarian since they do not worship any particular deity.  

Many of India's scholars and distinguished persons at the forefront of public life, such as the Nobel Prize poet Rabindranath Tagore, and Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, India's learned President from 1962 to 1967 who once taught Comparative Religions at Oxford, have expressed deep reverence for Vedantist thought.  As the accepted philosophy of intellectual Hinduism, Vedanta has also attracted to it in recent times a number of Western thinkers and artists.

Vedanta emphasizes Brahman, the Ultimate Reality, the "One-Without-a-Second," which is infinite, eternal, omniscient, omnipresent and incomprehensible, from which the universe eternally evolves, appears and disappears.

Although conceived far back in the early Upanishadic schools of philosophy, Vedanta today is the result of a continuous process of development.  At the same time, the ideas embodied in the rather general term "Vedantism" have never been combined in one fixed system.  They are, as Dr. Radhakrishnan has said, "simply the thoughts of the wise, not always agreeing in detail, and presented as independent utterances, each with its own values."  

An example of this deliberate absence of theological systematization can be found in a volume of general essays, Vedanta for the Western World, edited by author and novelist Christopher Isherwood, and published in the United States in 1946.

Distinguished Western contributors included Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, John Van Druten, and again Christopher Isherwood, along with many eminent Hindu swamis and sannyasins, persons who have renounced their lives as ordinary citizens to live the holy life.

Among the many approaches to God possible in the different Vedantist schools there might be briefly mentioned two forms designated as "the method of the monkey," and "the method of the cat."  In the latter concept a person is "saved" by God without participation or effort on his part, just as a kitten is carried to safety by the scruff of the neck.  In the former, a person wishing salvation must turn and cling to God as a baby monkey clings to its mother.

The highest types of Vedantist training are concerned with shifting the attention from the exterior to the interior world.  In a sense it might be claimed that Vedanta offers its followers a map and guidebook to the unknown inner world from which alone, in its view, the mysteries of the so-called objective world may be understood and put in proper perspective.

Dr. Radhakrishnan has written: "From the outward physical fact, attention shifts to the inner immortal self, the Atman, situated at the back of the mind, as it were. We need not look to the sky for the bright light; the glorious fire is within the soul," the Atman.

Specific exercises are considered essential to bring about this direct apprehension of Atman/Brahman in its pure form.  Training includes the study of certain religious texts, sessions with an approved teacher, a guru, who listens to the aspirant, and who also, significantly, exchanges discussion with him in an analytical manner. 

These first stages are to be followed by ever more profound reflection and a deepening of meditation until the aspirant has arrived at a certain one-pointed inner concentration "beyond the sphere of argument or reasoned thought."

The daily meditation which forms so essential a part of a Vedantist's discipline finds ultimate realization in the phrase: Tat vam asi, "That art Thou."  In other words, a person's hidden self or soul, the Atman, is identical with Brahman, the World Soul, so called. 

Regarding Brahman, a modern Vedantist, Swami Nikhilananda, who lived and taught in the West, adds: "Brahman does not exist as an empirical object, for instance, like a pot or a tree, but as Absolute Existence, without which material objects would not be perceived to exist.  Just as a mirage cannot be seen without the desert, its unrelated substratum, so also the universe cannot exist without Brahman."